Research Editors

One of the biggest bugbears for SAs is the danger of losing their licence once they are out of work. From the date of being de-registered by a firm, SAs have two years to get re-registered and keep their licence active. If they don’t manage this, after the two years are up, they have to retake the Series 16 exam, but they can only do this if they can persuade a firm to take them on and sponsor them to do so. However, most firms require SAs to have an active licence in place before they will hire them. This leads to a Catch-22 situation: in order to get re-registered they have to be taken on by a firm, but in order to be taken on by a firm they have to be registered! Some firms will allow unregistered SAs to retake the exam while working and sometimes it is possible to obtain a waiver from FINRA. But neither option is certain. This has been a source of unfairness for out-of-work SAs, particularly those who have had the bad luck of losing work during a prolonged downturn. Change is comin...

What does an editor do? Is it just run spellcheck and hit send? If only it were that simple… One of the things editors do is try to make sense of complex sentences. Often authors will come up with a sentence that makes perfect sense in their mind, but when the words hit the page the meaning is obscure to the reader. The editor’s job is to make that sentence comprehensible. The editor must therefore spend time and effort trying to parse the meaning. For example: “You don’t know what you don’t know you don’t know.” This sentence features at the end of the book The Hidden Half by Michael Blastland. Is it gobbledygook or is there some meaning in there? Let’s analyse what it means. There are three “you don’t know”s and a crucial “what” on which the whole sentence hangs. Let’s start with “You don’t know”. Will the FTSE100 go up or down tomorrow? You don’t know. There is no uncertainty in this. Hundreds of years of stockmarket movements tell us with certainty that predicting the movement of ...

Second chance for unregistered SAs FINRA has given SAs deregistered before March 2022 a second chance to maintain their registrations. Its new Maintaining Qualifications Program (MQP) set up in 2022 enables SAs without an employer to maintain their registration for five years by carrying out continuing education through the FINRA website.   However, SAs deregistered before March 2022 had just two months between January and March 2022 to sign up to the MQP. Some SAs without registrations were unaware of the programme and so failed to get registered, thus risking losing their licence. FINRA has now opened up a second and longer enrollment period. SAs deregistered between 15 March 2020 and 15 March 2022 now have until 31 December 2023 to register with the MQP. They must have been registered continuously for the 12 months before their registration was terminated. For example, if their registration was terminated on 31 January 2022, they would have to have been registered at the latest ...