At SIFMA's Listed Options Symposium, the organization's Executive Vice President Randy Snook spoke about the importance of listed options and the challenges that market structure imposes on these financial products. Mr. Snook explained that "SIFMA has long called for a holistic and comprehensive review of market structure" and that options should be part of the review. He noted that certain ideas are working well in the listed options market and could be applied to other markets. He voiced support for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's initiative to adopt the principles-based risk

SEC and FINRA issued an Investor Alert to warn investors that certain penny stocks being promoted aggressively as investment opportunities may in fact be the stocks of dormant shell companies with little to no business operations. The investor alert offers five tips to help investors avoid scams involving dormant shell companies: Research whether the company was dormant and then brought back to life. You can search for the company name or trading symbol in the SEC's EDGAR database to see when the company may have last filed periodic reports. Know where the stock trades. Most pump-and-dump

FINRA announced that Richard W. Berry will become its Executive Vice President and Director of Dispute Resolution beginning on December 1, 2014. Mr. Berry will replace Linda Fienberg, who will retire on November 30, 2014. See: FINRA Press Release.

The European Commission adopted its first "equivalence" decision for the regulatory regimes of central counterparties ("CCPs") in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. The CCPs in these jurisdictions will be able to obtain recognition in the EU, and therefore can be used by market participants to clear standardized OTC derivatives as required by EU legislation, while remaining subject solely to the regulation and supervision of their home jurisdiction. According to the press release, the details of the rules may differ, but international regulators are pursuing the same objective: to

At a meeting in Berlin on October 29, 2014, 51 countries and jurisdictions signed a multilateral competent authority agreement to implement the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's ("OECD's") new automatic exchange of tax information standard, which is referred to as the Common Reporting Standard ("CRS"). The agreement, which is based on the Model 1 Intergovernmental Agreement developed by the United States under FATCA, allows countries to adopt enhanced due diligence and reporting requirements on their financial institutions in order to collect information and to