The National Futures Association ("NFA") barred and fined futures commission merchant ("FCM") Vision Financial Markets ("Vision Financial") and commodity trading adviser ("CTA") Ace Investment Strategists ("Ace Investment") from membership for misappropriating customer funds related to trade allocations. According to the complaint, Vision Financial facilitated Ace Investment's actions, even though the firm was in a position to identity and stop the abuses. The complaint stated that Vision Financial has had a "long history of supervisory issues," as it has been a subject of four prior

The House Financial Services Committee approved two bills regarding the authority and transparency of the Financial Stability Oversight Council ("FSOC"). H.R. 4881, which was agreed to as amended, places a one-year moratorium on the authority of the FSOC to make financial stability determinations. The bill was approved 32-27 and would prevent the FSOC from designating any new insurance companies or asset managers as "systemically important" for one year as Congress continues to review the FSOC's process for deeming bank and non-bank institutions to be significant. H.R. 4387, or the FSOC

SEC Chair Mary Jo White delivered a speech at the Economic Club of New York, discussing the changing nature of intermediation and the importance of considering competition and technology in addressing market structure issues. Chair White explained that securities markets operate within a structure of rules which is based not only on regulation, but also on the complex interaction of regulation with competition and technology. Considering this "dynamic reality," Chair White stated that the SEC should not be chasing regulatory solutions that "fix" market structure once and for all, since the

The SEC approved the FINRA-proposed rule change to amend FINRA Rule 11892 to add new provisions that address multi-day clearly erroneous events and transactions occurring during trading halts, as well as make non-substantive clarifications to the rule. See: SEC Order of Approval. Related news: FINRA-Proposed Rule Change Relating to Clearly Erroneous Transactions in Exchange-Listed Securities (Fed. Reg.)(May 6, 2014); Proposed Rule Change to Amend FINRA Rule 11892 (April 17, 2014); FINRA-Proposed Rule Change to Extend the Clearly Erroneous Pilot Program for Exchange-Listed Securities (Fed. Reg

The CFTC held a public roundtable to discuss issues concerning hedges of a physical commodity by a commercial enterprise, including gross hedging, cross-commodity hedging, anticipatory hedging, and the process for obtaining a non-enumerated exemption from position limits. Discussion also included the settling of spot month limits in physical-delivery and cash-settled contracts, a conditional spot-month limit exemption, and certain aggregations of positions. Click here to view a summary of the meeting by Delta Strategy Group. See: CFTC Press Release.