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To explain actions the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought on August 27, 2018, against a group of affiliated investment advisers and broker-dealers for what the SEC considered misleading and insufficient representations and disclosures, insufficient compliance policies and procedures, and insufficient research and oversight concerning the use of faulty quantitative models to manage certain client accounts.

Explains the SEC’s findings concerning the advisers’ and broker-dealers’ failure to confirm that certain models worked as intended, to disclose the risks associated with the use of those models, to disclose the role of a research analyst in developing the models, to disclose the use of volatility overlays along with the associated risks, to determine whether a fund’s holdings were sufficient to support a consistent dividend payout without a return of capital, and to take sufficient steps to confirm the advertised performance of another investment manager whose products they were marketing. Provides insight into the SEC’s position and offers key takeaways.

These cases are significant for advisers who use quantitative models to implement their investment strategies in the management of client accounts and signal the SEC’s continued focus on investment advisers’ compliance with disclosure obligations to discretionary account investors.

Each manager should consider its own facts and circumstances, and should consult with counsel, in assessing how and to what extent to incorporate the SEC’s conclusions in crafting disclosure and other communications with investors on matters such as adequate representations, testing and validation of models, disclosure of errors, and verifying performance claims.

Practical guidance from experienced securities lawyers.

To explain the US Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) staff’s (the “Staff”) participating affiliate exemption from investment adviser registration for foreign advisers set forth in a line of Staff no-action letters issued between 1992 and 2005 (the “Participating Affiliate Letters”) and to discuss recent guidance issued by the Staff in an information update published in March 2017 (the “Information Update”) with respect to complying with requirements of the Participating Affiliate Letters.

Reviews the development of the Staff’s approach regarding the non-registration of foreign advisers that rely on the Participating Affiliate Letters from prior to the issuance of those letters through the Information Update and sets forth recommendations for registered investment advisers and their participating affiliates.

While there are arguments that the Information Update goes beyond restating established standards and does not clearly explain whether submission of all listed documentation is required, the Information Update will likely standardize the information submitted to the SEC.

Practical guidance for advisers relying on the Participating Affiliate Letters from experienced securities and financial services lawyers.

At the heart of the commentary on recent financial scandals and the legislative response in Sarbanes‐Oxley has been attention to the need for effective compliance programs at corporations to prevent misconduct. Coincident with these regulatory developments, the Federal Sentencing Commission has invited a review of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which are now over a decade old. One element of those guidelines, the standards for sentencing corporations, has greatly influenced thinking about effective compliance systems. This article reviews the Federal Sentencing Guidelines in a critical light and distills insights from other authorities to define the elements of an effective compliance program for any organization. The investment advisory industry is used as an example for applying the rules of good compliance.

Three books published this month have birds on their frontispiece and whilst, for instance, the mute swan is shown with uncanny resemblance to Concorde, the most relevant is the drawing of a wandering albatross for it appears in “Flight and Nature”. It is hardly surprising it is published privately for the immense quantity of diagrams and formulae means that anyone prepared to read it from cover to cover must be interested in the subject to a degree somewhere beyond passionate. The enormous number of illustrations and graphs range from double‐folding wing of F. auricularia, an insect, to contra‐oscillation compensation where two propellers are used and nowhere, gratefully, is there any mention of da Vinci. It is above all a work of love and of profound dedication.

Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.