Brokerage Firms

State prosecutors got a green light Friday to continue their fraud case against the Los Angeles-based company that manages American Funds, the largest U.S. stock and bond mutual fund group. A California Court of Appeal panel in Los Angeles ruled that Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown had the right to pursue the state's 2-year-old suit alleging that the fund company failed to adequately explain to its shareholders how it compensated brokerages that pitched its products. Capital Group Cos.

The Securities and Exchange Commission loosened rules for how brokers can share stock-trading commissions with non-brokers, a decision that may enable Wall Street's largest firms to keep more revenue. The SEC's Division of Market Regulation told Goldman Sachs Group Inc. it could share investors' trading commissions with non-brokers without fear of sanctions. The regulator's so-called no-action letter, written to explain an agency policy, was posted on its website Jan. 24.

Underscoring the growing clout of hedge funds, federal regulators are seeking to determine whether Wall Street stock brokerages routinely leak sensitive trading information to people running these investment vehicles.

Charles Schwab Corp. posted its eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit earnings growth as an influx of customer deposits during the first three months of the year helped the discount broker shake off turbulent market conditions. The San Francisco-based company said Tuesday that it earned $273 million, or 22 cents a share, during the first quarter. That was up 12% from net income of $243 million, or 19 cents a share, at the same time last year.

Tens of millions of dollars have been looted from online brokerage accounts in a fast-growing fraud that targets hotel guests and Internet cafe patrons, FBI officials say. The scams cost New York-based E-Trade Financial Corp. $18 million in last year's third quarter to reimburse customers whose accounts were pilfered. TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. said it spent $4 million. The Justice Department unsealed its first criminal charges in such cases in March.

Banking giant Wachovia Corp. said Thursday that it had agreed to buy A.G. Edwards Inc., a 120-year-old St. Louis-based securities firm, for $6.8 billion in a deal that would create the second-largest U.S. brokerage firm. St. Louis-based A.G. Edwards, founded by a friend of President Lincoln, has fallen behind in the competition for stock trades as investors have turned to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., UBS, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Morgan Stanley. "A.G.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox on Thursday called on Congress to repeal legal protections for a long-running Wall Street practice in which money managers pay above-average trading commissions to brokerage firms in exchange for research and other perks. Regulators have called these transactions -- known on Wall Street as soft-dollar deals -- little more than kickbacks.

Wall Street offers a virtually unlimited smorgasbord of investment products and services. Andrew Crowell's strategy for competing: Stick with meat and potatoes, forget the rest. Crowell heads Los Angeles-based Crowell, Weedon & Co., a brokerage that prides itself on being a throwback to a less complicated time.

Wall Street won a major victory Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people who lost money on initial public stock offerings in the late-'90s Internet boom couldn't sue their brokerages under U.S. antitrust laws. The high court sided with investment banks that had been accused of conspiring to inflate IPO prices, ruling 7-to-1 that lawsuits alleging IPO abuses have to be brought under securities rather than antitrust statutes. The ruling reversed a U.S.