On May 23, 2018, the SEC proposed new rules and amendments that would promote research on mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, registered closed-end funds, business development companies, and similar investment funds. These changes would reduce obstacles often encountered in providing research on investment funds by aligning the treatment of such reports with research on other public entities. The Congressional mandate of the Fair Access to Investment Act of 2017 (FAIR ACT) underlies the SEC’s actions in proposing these changes.
Continue reading "SEC Proposes FAIR Act Rules to Promote Research..." »Monday, May 28. 2018
SEC Proposes FAIR Act Rules to Promote Research Reports on Investment Funds
Friday, May 25. 2018
LDC #86: Uncovering the Storage Vault
Computers are amazing at creating things like photos, videos, papers, books, Powerpoint presentations, and the ultimate combination of all of the above: Grumpy Cat memes. An essential but often invisible part of computers is the storage space where all of this stuff goes: hard drives, network drives, and other physical storage space. These things are required to make your computer work the way it should, but they do a very good job at not calling attention to themselves. However, knowing that storage spaces exist and how you can interact with them can help you later on when you want to create programs and scripts that require certain types of storage to be available.
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Friday, May 18. 2018
LDC #85: Math Functions in Legato
For this week’s blog we are going to create a simple calculator using Legato. Legato offers a wide variety of math functions that we can use to program the calculator. Before we get started coding, let’s think about the parts of the script we will need. First there will need to be a user interface. In our case, a dialog works perfectly. Secondly, we need to have a way to store operands, and a floating point number is good choice here. If we use only an integer the user cannot do decimal math. Finally, we will need to have operation processing. For this we will use Legato’s math functions. To begin I am going to set up the basics of the dialog, and we can add the processing together.
Continue reading "LDC #85: Math Functions in Legato" »Monday, May 14. 2018
SEC Launches Additional Investor Protection Search Tool
Friday, May 11. 2018
LDC #84: Dialog Boxes Part III — List Boxes
Allowing the user to select items or review lists of data is fundamental to many interfaces. For one or two items, radio buttons or check boxes can work, but for more complex data, a list box can be a good choice. In this blog, I will cover the ‘listbox’ common control, one of many methods of presenting and managing lists of data.
Continue reading "LDC #84: Dialog Boxes Part III — List Boxes" »Monday, May 07. 2018
SEC Enforcement Division Issues FAQs for Share Class Selection Disclosure Initiative
On May 1st, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Enforcement released answers to frequently asked questions concerning the Share Class Selection Disclosure (SCSD) Initiative. This initiative was announced earlier this year on February 12th with the goal of protecting advisory clients from undisclosed conflicts of interest and aid in returning money to those investors affected by previous undisclosed conflicts of interest.
Continue reading "SEC Enforcement Division Issues FAQs for Share..." »Friday, May 04. 2018
LDC #83: Validating With The XBRL Object Part 2
Back in February, I wrote a blog post about how we can use the XBRL Object in Legato to do some extra validation on XBRL. In that blog we added a check for the number of custom elements. That was a relatively basic application of XBRL in Legato though, not very complicated. What if we want to do something a lot more in depth? For example, check to ensure we’re not defining any cyclic presentation relationships. By that, I mean that you have a dimension - member pair in a context, but in the presentation properties for a presentation where that context appears the domain for that dimension is set to the same member. That’s a cyclic relationship; saying something is it’s own parent element. This isn’t Futurama, you can’t be your own grandfather in XBRL.
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Tuesday, May 01. 2018
SEC Proposes Regulation Best Interest to Enhance Protections for Retail Investors
The Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed a package of rulemakings and interpretations designed to enhance the quality and transparency of investors’ relationships with investment advisers and broker-dealers. These changes will also preserve access to a variety of types of advice relationships and investment products. Generally, the proposed regulations would enhance investor protection by applying consistent principles to investment advisers and broker-dealers that provide for clear disclosures, encouraging exercising due care, and addressing conflicts of interest.
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