Brokerage Firm

A woman who had been wandering the streets for eight years was headed home for a Christmas reunion with her family because she remembered she once had invested in the stock market. When a bedraggled Alice Perley wandered into the brokerage firm of A.G. Edwards & Sons in Nashville last week, the first person she met by the elevator was Michael Guess. "I could tell she was homeless," Guess, a financial analyst with the firm, said Friday. "It was obvious she needed help."

Salomon Smith Barney, beset by high-profile financial scandals, will propose on Friday a detailed settlement offer to federal regulators that will include a large fine and structural reform, sources said Wednesday.

Wells Fargo & Co. said it bought San Diego-based brokerage and investments firm FAS Holdings for undisclosed terms to expand its distribution channels and its roster of wealthy clients. FAS provides securities transaction processing and investment products to almost 500 independent financial consultants in 50 states through its unit First Allied Securities Inc. It also provides intermediary clearing for small broker-dealers at its Western Securities Clearing unit.

Investors spooked by the recent spate of scandals in the securities industry have a new tool for evaluating their brokerage firms. Weiss Ratings Inc., a Florida-based corporate rating firm, has come up with an "integrity rating" for investment companies. The rating, compiled by tabulating data on arbitration awards, lawsuits and regulatory actions against securities firms, is designed to help investors avoid those that attract the most attention from regulators and complaints from customers.

Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, Greater Los Angeles Company has entered into a five-year partnership agreement with Playa Vista to serve as the sole on-site real estate company offering relocation assistance to the planned community. The residential real estate firm will provide services to companies and individuals relocating to Playa Vista, a 1,087-acre development near Marina del Rey. Playa Vista expects to list homes for sale by the end of 2002.

Merrill Lynch & Co. shares had their biggest gain in more than a year Wednesday as the firm neared a settlement of New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer's probe of whether its stock analysts misled investors. Spitzer said he may not ask Merrill to compensate aggrieved shareholders. Merrill (ticker symbol: MER) climbed $3.15 to $43.95 in the biggest gain since April 2001.

Steven Madden, who parlayed platform sneakers and other trendy footwear for young women into a $200-million-a-year business, was sentenced Thursday to 41 months in prison for manipulating initial public offerings. Madden, the former chief executive of the company that bears his name, admitted last year that he conspired with two brokerages to inflate IPO share prices. The scheme earned him $3.1 million and cost investors almost $100 million, authorities said. U.S.

UBS PaineWebber is dropping a new policy that called for fining brokers who buy shares of new stocks and quickly sell them. Instead, the nation's fourth-largest brokerage firm will reward brokers with records for selling shares of initial public stock offerings--or IPOs--to longer-term investors, according to a company source who spoke on condition of anonymity. The reward will consist of rights to greater number of those shares, the source said Thursday.

Boyd L. Jefferies, the controversial founder of the Los Angeles brokerage firm Jefferies & Co., died Thursday near his home in Aspen, Colo., apparently of a heart attack, a spokesman for the company said. He was 70. Jefferies was one of the nation's most powerful traders of big blocks of stock and was a pivotal figure in the corporate raids of the early 1980s.

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., its shares buffeted by rumors of large trading losses in high-yield junk bonds, tried to do damage control on Wednesday--and it seemed to work. The firm, in an unusual announcement, said losses on corporate junk bond holdings in the third and fourth quarters will total about $90 million. That's far below the $1-billion figure that had been floating around Wall Street. The brokerage's stock (ticker symbol: MWD) rallied after the announcement to close up $3.