The SEC recently announced that it charged a former broker with knowingly or recklessly trading unsuitable investment products for five customers and taking $170,000 for one of those customers. These charges follow a prior SEC Investor Alert warning about excessive trading and churning as well as another one focused on the risks associated with exchange-traded notes.

The broker must not have read those two alerts. According to the SEC, the broker enriched himself by systematically disregarding client investor profiles. He repeatedly traded in risky, unsuitable and volatile products like leveraged exchange-traded funds and exchange-traded notes.

This case provides a number of lessons that firms should take away. Specifically, the SEC publishes Investor Alerts for a reason. The SEC is doing your work for you by flagging an issue for investors, as well as firms.

The second thing that this case hammers home is that firms must be more diligent in their broker supervision. As part of the firm’s ordinary surveillance, it should have flagged the unsuitable sale of highly volatile products to relatively unsophisticated clients.

A valuable thumb rule to follow is that as the sophistication of the products increases so should the sophistication of the customer buying those products. Although this rule of thumb will not completely stop all bad brokers, it will go a long way toward flagging those brokers before they cause harm to your clients and liability for your firm.

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