The dot-com bubble was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Internet, resulting in a dispensation of available venture capital and the rapid growth of valuations in new dot-com startups.
The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 is a United States federal law that mandates certain practices in financial record keeping and reporting for corporations. The act,, also known as the "Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act" and "Corporate and Auditing Accountability, Responsibility, and Transparency Act" and more commonly called Sarbanes–Oxley, SOX or Sarbox, contains eleven sections that place requirements on all U.S. public company boards of directors and management and public accounting firms. A number of provisions of the Act also apply to privately held companies, such as the willful destruction of evidence to impede a federal investigation.
In finance, being short in an asset means investing in such a way that the investor will profit if the value of the asset falls. This is the opposite of a more conventional "long" position, where the investor will profit if the value of the asset rises.
The 2003 mutual fund scandal was the result of the discovery of illegal late trading and market timing practices on the part of certain hedge fund and mutual fund companies.
Charles Christopher Cox is an American attorney and politician who served as chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a 17-year Republican member of the United States House of Representatives, and member of the White House staff in the Reagan Administration. Prior to his Washington service he was a practicing attorney, teacher, and entrepreneur. Following his retirement from government in 2009, he returned to law practice and currently serves as a director, trustee, and advisor to several for-profit and nonprofit organizations.
An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is a type of investment fund that is also an exchange-traded product, i.e., it is traded on stock exchanges. ETFs own financial assets such as stocks, bonds, currencies, debts, futures contracts, and/or commodities such as gold bars. The list of assets that each ETF owns, as well as their weightings, is posted on the website of the issuer daily, or quarterly in the case of active non-transparent ETFs. Many ETFs provide some level of diversification compared to owning an individual stock.
The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 is a law governing the secondary trading of securities in the United States of America. A landmark of wide-ranging legislation, the Act of '34 and related statutes form the basis of regulation of the financial markets and their participants in the United States. The 1934 Act also established the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency primarily responsible for enforcement of United States federal securities law.
Penny stocks are common shares of small public companies that trade for less than one dollar per share. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) uses the term "Penny stock" to refer to a security, a financial instrument which represents a given financial value, issued by small public companies that trade at less than $5 per share. Penny stocks are priced over-the-counter, rather than on the trading floor. The term "penny stock" refers to shares that, prior to the SEC's classification, traded for "pennies on the dollar". In 1934, when the United States government passed the Securities Exchange Act to regulate any and all transactions of securities between parties which are "not the original issuer", the SEC at the time disclosed that equity securities which trade for less than $5 per share could not be listed on any national stock exchange or index.
AIM is a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange that was launched on 19 June 1995 as a replacement to the previous Unlisted Securities Market (USM) that had been in operation since 1980. It allows companies that are smaller, less-developed, or want/need a more flexible approach to governance to float shares with a more flexible regulatory system than is applicable on the main market.
Securities fraud, also known as stock fraud and investment fraud, is a deceptive practice in the stock or commodities markets that induces investors to make purchase or sale decisions on the basis of false information. The setups are generally made to result in monetary gain for the deceivers, and generally result in unfair monetary losses for the investors. They are generally violating securities laws.
In finance, options backdating is the practice of altering the date a stock option was granted, to a usually earlier date at which the underlying stock price was lower. This is a way of repricing options to make them more valuable when the option "strike price" is fixed to the stock price at the date the option was granted. Cases of backdating employee stock options have drawn public and media attention.
The Securities Fraud Deterrence and Investor Restitution Act was H.R. 2179 (2003-2004) and is a bill currently on the Union Calendar.
An alternative public offering (APO) is the combination of a reverse merger with a simultaneous private investment of public equity (PIPE). It allows companies an alternative to an initial public offering (IPO) as a means of going public while raising capital.
Jean Buttner was the Chairman of the Board, President, CEO, and COO of Value Line, Inc. and Arnold Bernhard & Co., Inc. Buttner had held these positions since 1986. She was forced to step down and relinquish all executive titles with Value Line and its family of mutual funds by the Securities and Exchange Commission on November 4, 2009 as part of a settlement to avoid litigation.
A Business Development Company ("BDC") is a form of unregistered closed-end investment company in the United States that invests in small and mid-sized businesses. This form of company was created by the US Congress in 1980 in the amendments to the Investment Company Act of 1940. Publicly filing firms may elect regulation as BDCs if they meet certain requirements of the Investment Company Act.
The Knight Capital Group was an American global financial services firm engaging in market making, electronic execution, and institutional sales and trading. With its high-frequency trading algorithms Knight was the largest trader in U.S. equities, with a market share of 17.3% on NYSE and 16.9% on NASDAQ. The company agreed to be acquired by Getco LLC in December 2012 after an August 2012 trading error lost $460 million. The merger was completed in July 2013, forming KCG Holdings.
Qurate Retail, Inc., also known as Qurate Retail Group, is an American media conglomerate controlled by company chairman John C. Malone, who owns a majority of the voting shares.
David Weild IV is an American investment banker and financial commentator best known for holding the position as Vice Chairman of NASDAQ. He is currently the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Weild & Co. Inc., parent company of the investment banking firm Weild Capital, LLC Weild is also known as the "father" of the JOBS Act, and has been involved in drafting legislation for the US Congress.
Ligand Pharmaceuticals is a biopharmaceutical company located in San Diego, California. Founded in 1987 as Progenix Inc., the company went public in 1992. Initially focused on developing its own drugs, a period of turbulence in the early 2000s culminated in its CEO being ejected by the shareholders and provoked a change in focus to the acquisition of existing drugs and forming partnerships to develop them further.
MiMedx Group is a biomedical company based in Marietta, Georgia, founded in 2008. It is traded on the NASDAQ as MDXG. The CEO is Tim Wright. Using tissues from birth such as the placenta, amniotic sac, and umbilical cord, MiMedx creates skin for skin grafts. With the arrival of Wright in May 2019, the company accelerated the process of working with auditors and regulators to resolve legal and financial issues created by the previous management. Wright also began a cultural and financial turnaround, assembling a new senior management team by August 2019 to instill “transparency, truthfulness, and timeliness” in communications and business dealings. As of December 2020, the company had approximately 735 employees.
