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As public servants, I feel it's in part their unwritten duty to contribute to my entertainment. Why else would I bother paying taxes?
Poor dude was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Besides, for pure entertainment value, who cares if such a suit was completely without merit?
Lawyers don't come cheaply. And if you're gonna file a Bivens suit, you'll want someone who's experienced... not some trembling mall lawyer who graduated from the University of the Pacific Trust Territories Extension School of Law in American Samoa and practices next to a video game arcade.
Maybe if, like, someone started a Task Force, and, like, collected $25 from each of the BCIT shareholders...
On the contrary, there have been plenty of revoked issues over the years that had "fails" outstanding prior to revocation. If the underlying shares have no value, those "fails" ultimately get ignored.
Ultimately, it's going to be up to Megas to demonstrate that BCIT shares have value. And he's not going to accomplish that with a Chinese fire drill of a share exchange. He needs to get his shares re-registered. Unfortunately, even a Form 211 back door to get on the pinksheets again is probably out of the question as FINRA is not going to issue a symbol for a blank check company.
Probably not. But then again, it's not relevant if the stock is worthless.
No shares. The presence or absence of shares isn't relevant.
Selling customer at broker/dealer A, who has a long position, albeit with a "fail", wishes to close out his long position. Broker/dealer A enters an order to sell his customer's shares. Broker/dealer B has a gullible investor who wants to buy the shares. In essence, the "fail" from the selling customer at broker/dealer A gets passed on to the gullible customer at broker/dealer B.
This, of course, will only feed into the goofball conspiratorialists' delusions, but it is possible that there were ex-clearing trades between broker/dealers (i.e. done away from DTCC) where one broker/dealer's customer was looking to sell and another broker/dealer's customer was looking to buy. Of course, if the selling customer's position happened to be an old "fail to deliver" from the period before the DTCC chill, then the new buyer would just be one more link in the chain of "fails".
Once the "chill" was in effect, I doubt anyone was doing buy-ins to reconcile fails. They were just facilitating those customers who were smart enough to get out of BCIT before the door shut on them.
They already did.
His "relentlessness" doesn't seem to have accomplished much. FINRA won't even correspond with him now and the stock is no closer to trading than it was when he appeared on the scene.
You been hanging around Kim Jong Un?
No, they're not going to be held accountable. DTCC could hold 100 shares and it wouldn't matter. BCIT is worthless.
Anyone who successfully shorted BCIT, naked or otherwise, took the right side of that trade.
Was she a mail order bride? They should look into the return policy, but I bet there's a hefty restocking fee...
"Butthead" Burrell already beat you to it. Some time ago, he and some British guy (Terry Ramsden) reverse merged with a company called Mesa Gold that they then named "Private Trading Systems, Inc." They touted a trading system, "PETS", that was going to put an end to "market abuses".
Unfortunately, once Ramsden's checkered past came out, they quietly withdrew their paperwork to get listed on the American Stock Exchange. At one point, PVTD had a market cap that rivaled Overstock.com (and that was back when Overstock.com itself had a really over-inflated market cap).
But like all good reverse merger lotion jobs, it rolled over and died.
Actually, Alan, you've just stumbled upon why there's unlike to ever be a buy-in for the BCIT bagholders. Unless or until BCIT gets registered again, there will be no trades... including buy-ins.
It's more than just goof-ball, penny-stock rubes getting cooked on this board!
I know. Some people are incorrigibly obtuse. But I can't rule out the possibility that someone might be reading this thread who would want to see what really happened with Lehman Brothers and the other banks. They at least deserve to see that clowns like him are full of crap.
No distortion at all.
Did you ever look at Lehman's balance sheet before they crashed?
It was leveraged 32:1. And its asset base was heavily populated with mortgage-backed securities of questionable quality. All it would have taken would've been a 3% haircut to their asset base, and all their equity disappears. (And the hit to their asset base as the housing bubble collapsed ended up being far worse than 3%.)
And this doesn't even address the HUNDREDS of BILLIONS of dollars worth of off-balance sheet derivative exposure they had.
Lehman was a train going off the cliff, regardless of whether or not anyone actually shorted it. But if you happen to be a short seller, finding train wrecks is what makes you the bling.
Of course they were. When a naked short seller recognizes a company that is being wrecked by its management, shorting its stock or other securities is the logical response.
However, you do have "cause" and "effect" confused. "Naked short selling" didn't cause Lehman Brothers and all the subprime/Alt-A banks to collapse. "Naked short selling" those outfits was successful ONLY because we correctly surmised that their managements were setting them up for failure.
The banks weren't collapsed by naked short sellers.
They were collapsed by management teams that massively leveraged toxic, mortgage-backed assets by as much as 30:1.
No legitimate company has ever been "collapsed" by short sellers of any flavor, "naked" or otherwise.
Stipulating to the findings of a temp judge in small claims court. Doing so took any chance of appealing or moving it to a higher court off the table.
I don't think many people are concerned with it. But we'll see what happens if someone else tries to go the small claims route again. Maybe it really is a viable option for anyone hoping to get back some money from this disaster. However, it's more likely that other broker/dealers, and E*Trade themselves, will learn from the mistake Lynne Dewhurst-McBurney made with that case.
I suspect she's not really of the opinion you can get your initial amount of money given back to you. I think she merely acknowledges it as one way that someone successfully got their money back and that maybe, if you're lucky, you could have similar luck. However, the Fresno, CA small claims court case against E*Trade was an aberration. I doubt you'll ever see another broker/dealer's lawyer agree to accept the decision of a temp judge in small claims again.
If they acted in the capacity of "agent", there is nothing for them to do. Unless Megas actually gets around to bringing BCIT public again, which he doesn't seem to be doing.
Check your trade ticket first to see what capacity your broker/dealers acted when you did your trade. If the ticket is marked with your broker/dealer acting as "agent", then they didn't sell you anything; they merely facilitated a trade between you and someone else. That "someone else" is a another story. However, if you're going to be accusing broker/dealers of knowingly selling something "they don't have", then at the very least you need to stick to tickets that were done with the broker/dealer acting as "principal".
I'm all for diversification, Jimmy. But for a moment there, I was convinced the CMKM Diamonds board had undergone a negative reality inversion*.
* "negative reality inversion" - See the "Sick" episode of the Young Ones.
Oh. Wow. Wrong door. Far out. It's the Cooking Channel. I could've sworn this was the CMKX gulliblers board... OH WAIT A MINUTE NOW... That's NOT Martha Stewart! That's NOT Robert Irvine! That's NOT Emeril Lagasse! That's NOT Rachael Ray!
You guys!!!
Yeah, now they're nitpicking, which is what regulators will tend to do if you stand up to them. It's not really Schwab or even optionsXpress they're going after here. They're going after Stern.
I don't know how familiar you are with broker/dealer compliance, but here's the real take-away with these new, tacked on charges:
1.) Stern was sloppy. No getting around this. If you make the decision to de-register an entity, then you don't just slime your way through it. You diligently complete the necessary paper work and you move on. And you never, ever start backdating material to fix a compliance mistake. "OX Trading LLC" is a separate entity from "optionsXpress". It will be interesting to see how Stern handles this. His trading as a "customer" of optionsXpress does not violate the registration requirements of CBOE... unless they're going to try to nail him for the RFQ's. The RFQ issue is the kicker. Stern has messed up, and he's probably going to have to eat it as punishment for trying to stand up to the SEC on the Reg SHO complaint.
2.) I can step into almost any OSJ for any broker/dealer in this country and find half a dozen violations. It doesn't mean that all the broker/dealers in this country are crooked nor does it mean that they're not bothering with the rules. Given the plethora of regulations, vague and occasionally contradictory as they can be, "Broker/Dealer Compliance" is as much an art-form as anything else in this day and age. If you're a compliance officer, you do the best you can with the resources at your disposal to keep your shop as clean as possible. But you're always aware that if some twerp from FINRA or the SEC is looking to put a feather in his or her cap at your expense, they can find something.
I'm sure after a day or two, one of the mouth-breathers in attendance will point out all of the most salient (which is code for "most amusing") points of the meeting. I wouldn't suggest you listen to ALL of it.
That is, unless you had a lot of peyote laying around...
Of course there is. You guys are a bunch of goofballs.
Oh, c'mon, Janice. Where's your sense of adventure? I bet it ends up being fun! Sort of like watching an H.R. Pufnstuf/Yo Gabba Gabba marathon whilst experimenting with peyote and psilocybe mushrooms...
Well, penny stock traders, as a group, are a bunch of morons. Most of them don't understand stocks, to say nothing of options. The whole "naked short selling" scam is generally nothing more than a means for crooked and/or inept management and promoters to divert attention away from lousy fundamentals or executive misconduct. They will cite anything, even if the active naked short selling of a stock isn't taking place, to show that the system is "corrupt" or "broken".
It's not so much that what OX did was "illegal". And here I feel it's important to make a distinction between an act that's "illegal" and a procedural violation. Feldman certainly did nothing illegal. He's not compelled to follow Reg SHO. (OX, on the other hand, as a member broker/dealer, has a regulatory duty to comply with Reg SHO.)
I doubt that there are many other cases like this lingering out there. If you read the complaint carefully, you'll see that Feldman was shopping around for other broker/dealers who'd let him write his D-I-T-M calls on his terms and was coming up dry. That's why he ended up coming back to OX.
The real underlying problem is that Reg SHO, itself, is manipulative. That's not something that the regulators want to hear, and it's certainly not something that the mouth-breathers who buy penny stocks want to hear, but the fact is, if you're forcing people to cover short positions that get generated when a call option gets exercised, what difference should it make if the buy to cover is done at 9:30AM or 9:45AM?
The difference is that by demanding positions be closed and marked to the open, Reg SHO is creating artificial price spikes at the beginning of the trading day. I'm sure that feels good for those people who have an agenda to "stick it to the shorts", but it's really bad, and really stupid, public policy.
Not quite. It wasn't that the "buy-write" arrangement avoided closing out the short position in the stock. It DID close out the short position in the stock.
The problem was that it violated the way the SEC wants short positions in Reg SHO stocks closed out.
If you were to do a "buy-write" after an assignment against a short call position for a stock that was not on the Reg SHO list, there would be no violation.
HOWEVER, the letter of the law of Reg SHO is that the customer is not to be given the time to enter a "buy-write" after an assignment. The customer is to be jammed with whatever price is printed on the tape at the open, and then he or she can try their luck at re-establishing their short call positions later.
It's really not as complex as the SEC makes it out to be.
Given that the securities underlying the call options Feldman was writing were on the Reg SHO list, when those call options were getting exercised overnight, OptionsExpress(OX) was supposed to buy-in the resulting short stock position AT the market open. And, in fact, they forced their other, smaller customers who were pursuing the same strategy to buy-in at the open.
However, Feldman was a larger customer. And instead of forcing him to buy-in at the open, they afforded him time to arrange "buy-writes" after the market opened to cover the short stock positions and re-establish the short call position he wanted to hold.
By giving him time to arrange his "buy-write" trades, they let Feldman off the hook for the risk that the stock would slide immediately after the open, which often happened, and therefore let him re-establish his short position in the calls at relatively more advantageous prices. The rest of the OX customers who were writing deep-in-the-money calls had to eat the risk.
I don't feel badly for you, jimmy. You're a wonderful source of amusement.
Most of the gulliblers did.
A splash of good wine always makes a positive difference, whether or not you actually get around to putting it in the sauce...
I know.
So was the refrigerator box.