If you’ve been watching any commercial television lately, you are well aware that the financial services industry is very busy running expensive ads imploring us to worry about our retirement futures. Open a new account today, they say.

They are not wrong that we should be doing something: America is facing a retirement crisis. One in three Americans has no retirement savings at all. One in two reports that they can’t save enough. On top of that, we are living longer, and health care costs, as we all know, are increasing.

But, as I found when investigati...

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Maureen Sloan, 63, of Newport Beach, Calif., claims former LPL Financial L.L.C. broker Alberto Neira stole $4.5 million from her through a fraudulent auto-financing scheme called Silver Oak Leasing. Ms. Sloan said she lost another $4 million in unsuitable trading of preferred stock. Ms. Sloan is the granddaughter of Walter Knott, founder of the Buena Park, Calif.-based Knott's Berry Farm.

Mr. Neira appears to have been associated with LPL Financial L.L.C. since February 2002.

LPL Financial LLC terminated Mr. Neira in January 2011 for "failure to fully discl...

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Between May 2006 and August 2008, Citigroup raised over $71 billion dollars the offerings of bonds, and its preferred stocks, (which are not bonds, as their yields are merely precatory), to investors whom may have otherwise been led to believe were safe, conservative, higher than average yield investments.

However, as set forth in the Consolidated Amended Class Action Complaint filed in the Southern District of New York, it was alleged that Citigroup sold these securities, w...

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It is OK to steal as long as you do not steal too much to get a greedy lawyer involved.

In the good old days, if you stole $100 from 2 million people, or $200 million, although no competent greedy lawyer would be willing to undertake your representation to recover your $100, the class action bar would line up to file a claim or class action lawsuit on your behalf and on behalf of all others similarly situated, to seek to recover the $200 million on behalf of the class of persons whom were also ripped off. Indeed, for smaller claims, the class action lawsuit is, and has been th...

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Everyone thinks that bonds, including U.S. Treasury Bonds are safe investments. Think again. If interest rates, which are at historical lows, rise, the market prices of bonds go down. Longer term bond prices go down real far down, and mutual funds that invest or trade bonds, will get hardest hit, and this has nothing to do with a credit rating, or the issuers’ ability to pay.

For example, if interest rates are 4%, and double to 8%, a thirty year bond which was purchased at par, let us say $100 per bond, would by definition lose 40% of its value.

Now of course,...

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