Try a little sleuthing
Bio Bopping
Someone pitches you a stock tip. Before you sink any money into it, you might want to do a little digging into the background of the person or firm with the National Association of Securities Dealers (nasd.com). For fun, try plugging Douglas Faneuil of Merrill Lynch--he's one of the stockbrokers in the middle of the Martha Stewart investigation--into the Public Disclosure Program search on the site. The results: Faneuil previously worked at D. E. Shaw Securities, Vassar College, Bennington College, and, most notably, Bill's House of Pizza. Of more interest is the "Disclosure Events: Maybe" section, which hints that there may be some, ahem, trouble spots on his record. To find out what that "maybe" refers to, you would have to request an E-mail report on Faneuil. Once that was delivered in a day or so, you would find out that--whoops!--Faneuil pleaded guilty to a criminal misdemeanor in October for accepting perks in return for failing to disclose to government investigators what he knew of Stewart's trades. You can do a similar search on futures industry pros at the National Futures Association site (nfa.futures.org). And you can E-mail securities complaints to the Securities and Exchange Commission via its Web site at sec.gov. -James M. Pethokoukis
This story appears in the June 16, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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