The securities fraud attorneys at Malecki Law are interested in hearing from investors who have complaints against stockbroker Alexander P. Brown III. Mr. Brown is currently employed and registered with Capital Portfolio Management, Inc. and works at the broker-dealer’s Timonium, Maryland office, according to his publicly available BrokerCheck records maintained by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).
Per his BrokerCheck report, Mr. Brown was previously employed and registered by Chapin, Davis from April 2008 to November 2015, a Baltimore, Maryland firm, and was discharged from that firm for “failure to follow written supervisory procedures for marking an account as deceased.” Prior to working at Chapin, Davis, Mr. Brown was employed and registered by Ferris, Baker Watts Incorporated from 2003 to 2008, also out of Baltimore, Maryland, according to his BrokerCheck report.
According to his BrokerCheck report, Mr. Brown was sanctioned in 2016 by the Maryland Securities Division and could not maintain discretionary accounts or serve in a supervisory capacity because he “continued to trade in discretionary account after client deceased while awaiting paperwork to retitle account.”
In 2016, Mr. Brown was fined and suspended from association with any FINRA member broker-dealer for 15 business days by FINRA, after submitting a Letter of Acceptance, Waiver and Consent No. 2015047883501 (AWC). According to the AWC, Mr. Brown violated NASD Conduct Rule 2510(b) (Discretionary Accounts) and FINRA Rule 2010 (Standards of Commercial Honor and Principles of Trade) because, “between May 2015 and October 2015, he effected 28 discretionary trades in the account of a customer without obtaining prior written authorization from the customer and without acceptance of the account as discretionary by Chapin.”
Rule 2510 requires that before a broker can exercise discretion in a customer’s account, the customer must give written authorization, and that authorization must be accepted in writing by the broker-dealer firm. Generally speaking, when a broker is said to have made discretionary transactions in a customer’s account, this means that the broker entered a trade of a security without obtaining the client’s authorization prior to making the transaction. If the customer did not authorize the trading, this is known as unauthorized trading.