American Realty Capital Properties’ stock price plunged nearly 20% on October 29th after the company disclosed that it had intentionally left mistakes in its financial statement uncorrected. 1 By November 3rd, less than a week later, American Realty Capital Properties’ shares had plummeted nearly 37% since the announcement. 2 According to Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell, an independent …
Continue reading “Testing Sarbanes-Oxley: The American Realty Capital Properties Scandal”
In an increasingly digital society, innovative technology that yields speed and efficiency can serve to spark industry-wide trends and influence future practice for years, even decades, thereafter. When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod in 2001, for example, Apple earned worldwide acclaim and provoked an incredible proliferation of similar devices.1 What, then, can be made …
Continue reading “A Market of Milliseconds: Unraveling the Tangled Future of High-Frequency Trading”
In response to the financial crisis of 2007-2008, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act to bolster financial regulations and monitor Wall Street behavior. Included in the Act were amendments to Rule 506 of the Securities Act of 1933.1 Rule 506 is part of the Regulation D exemption, which allows issuers to raise capital for private offerings. …
Continue reading “Citi Faces (a Very Minor) Slap on the Wrist”
Rise Companies Corporation, also known as Fundrise, acts as a crowdfunding and real estate investment platform based out of Washington, D.C. to promote local investment in real estate developments nationwide.1 Officially founded in 2012 –five years after the collapse of America’s financial and housing markets – Fundrise has put real estate crowdfunding on the charts.2 …
Although few retail investors in the United States have even heard of Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, anticipation on Wall Street this week for the company’s forthcoming I.P.O. is palpable.1 Touted by many as a uniquely positioned hybrid of eBay, Amazon, and Google, the company announced its plans earlier this year to go public in New …
Continue reading “Despite Outstanding Growth Prospects, Alibaba’s IPO Fraught with Risk”
Two years, one month, and three days have passed since President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act into law. A product of rare bipartisanship, the JOBS Act was praised on both sides of the aisle as improving access to capital for US small business, which would in turn drive economic growth.1 While …
Continue reading “(Jump)start Our Business Startups: The JOBS Act 500+ Days Later (Part 2)”
The stock price of King Digital Entertainment fell over 15% on its public debut on the New York Stock Exchange, despite the great success this mobile game maker has enjoyed from Candy Crush Saga, one of the biggest hits in the social mobile gaming industry.1 The drop was not surprising, however, as investors expressed fears …
Continue reading “Will King Meet the Same Fate as Zynga? I.P.O. in the Mobile Gaming Industry”
When President Barack Obama signed the JOBS Act into law on April 5, 2012, Section 3(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 was amended to include a new definition for “funding portal.”1 Funding portals, along with brokers, are the lucky players through which all crowdfunding transactions must be conducted.2 But just how lucky are …
Continue reading “Crowdfunding’s Intermediaries’ Obligation to Educate”
Institutional shareholder activism has often been viewed as a positive corporate governance tool to ameliorate shareholder collective action problems and keep management teams and boards of directors in check, particularly for large public companies with a widely dispersed group of shareholders. Typically, an activist shareholder (ranging from large individual stockholders to institutional investors) will use …
Continue reading “It May Be Time to Revisit Institutional Shareholder Activism”
Almost every user of social media like Facebook and Twitter knows that information they post online will be read by someone else, and might even be repeated to others. But what if the social media user was someone in the financial industry or a giant corporation announcing a strategic move or product development, and the …