Investigating Stockbrokers and Financial Advisers was originally held April 9, 2014. Learn whether stockbrokers or investment advisers have run afoul of regulators or been the subject of customer complaints. This one-hour webinar will guide you, step-by-step, through the FINRA BrokerCheck database and the SEC’s Investment Adviser registration database, which contain records on 1.3 million current and former professionals. You’ll also learn how state securities regulators police the industry and how to obtain results of their investigations for your stories. Reporters can conduct this research for free on any computer with an Internet connection; no special software or database knowledge is needed. WHAT YOU WILL LEARN Find regulatory penalties and employment history of stockbrokers and investment advisers using free databases. Understand how the SEC, state regulators and industry regulatory groups supervise Wall Street, and how to get your hands on their findings. Decode regulator-speak and find key “red flags” in these filings, such as “10b5” fraud and unsuitable investment cases. YOUR INSTRUCTOR Rob Wells is a lecturer at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and a former Reynolds Visiting Professor in Business Journalism at the University of South Carolina. A former SEC beat reporter, Wells used the FINRA and SEC databases in an extensive computer-assisted reporting project. For more information about training for journalists, please visit http://businessjournalism.org.