The SEC submitted two separate notices to the Office of Management and Budget requesting extensions for previously approved collections of information regarding (i) Exchange Act Form 10-Q and (ii) Investment Company Act rules that set forth procedures for filing registration statements. See: 80 FR 20515; 80 FR 20544.

The SEC announced fraud charges against a financial advisor accused of stealing from customers to fund his own brokerage accounts, and of squandering the bulk of that money in "highly unprofitable" options trading. The SEC found that the financial advisor abused his position as a private client advisor at a global bank by (i) persuading certain customers to withdraw millions of dollars from their accounts and (ii) promising that he would purchase safe and secure municipal bonds on their behalf. According to the complaint, the financial advisor bought himself cashier's checks and deposited them

The North American Securities Administrators Association issued a request for additional comments on its proposed uniform state model rule. The proposed rule concerns the exemption of certain merger and acquisition brokers from registration as "brokers," "dealers," "agents" and/or "broker-dealers" pursuant to state securities laws. Comments are due by May 17, 2015. Lofchie Comment: Firms that may rely on this exemption should submit comments, since the reasons for some of the imposed limitations (such as the size of the issuers involved in a transaction) are not obvious. See: NASAA Notice.

Commissioner Gallagher delivered a speech titled "An Agenda for Europe and the United States" at a Harvard Law School symposium. The speech focused on regulatory harmonization and where the SEC should concentrate its efforts. Commissioner Gallagher criticized Dodd-Frank, calling it "partisan manifesto untethered to the causes of the financial crisis." He compared Dodd-Frank's regulatory efforts on a domestic level to those of the G-20 and the Financial Stability Board ("FSB") on an international level. He pointed out that the FSB's regulatory harmonization efforts have "morphed into a top-down

BATS Global Markets ("BATS") filed proposed rules with the SEC to launch the new options exchange EDGX Options. Pending SEC approval, BATS plans to launch EDGX Options in November 2015. EDGX Options will use a pro rata order-matching model, which typically allocates an incoming market order to a group of limit orders at a given price level in proportion to the amount of volume the order represents. Currently, BATS operates BATS Options (now called "BZX Options"), which is an options exchange that uses a pure price-time priority order-matching model instead of the pro rata order matching model