Coinbase – a platform used to buy and sell currency – has temporarily disabled its users from being able to purchase Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies using US dollars.
Users who have attempted to make purchases over the past day have received a message that reads, ‘USD purchases are temporarily disabled,’ while other currencies, including the British pound, are also reported to have been blocked from making purchases.
Coinbase hasn’t commented since its users started getting the message, however the platform has reported experiencing difficulties due a recent surge in interest following a rise in the price of Bitcoin.
It’s unclear whether the temporary issue is related to the technical issues the app has been experiencing, or whether it’s a move from Coinbase to try and slow or restrict purchases.
However, it comes in the wake of trading platform Robinhood suspending sales of hugely popular Reddit stocks, GameStop and AMC, causing concern that similar blockages could be happening with Bitcoin too.
If the latter were to be true, it would be an incredibly unpopular move given all the backlash Robinhood is facing for allegedly protecting hedge fund millionaires at the steak of Reddit investors. Donald Trump Jr, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ted Cruz are among those who have criticised the platform.
One Reddit user has even filed a class action against the platform, after it blocked any further sales of GameStop stock due to ‘volatility of the market’.
Meanwhile, the value of Bitcoin has soared over the past couple of days, after Tesla founder Elon Musk changed his Twitter bio to simply read ‘#bitcoin’.
In just one hour after the multibillionaire updated his profile, the cryptocurrency’s value soared from around $32,000 (£23,500) to above $37,000 (£27,000,) per online trading site Coinbase.
Elsewhere, a cryptocurrency that began as a joke, has also soared in value by 140%, following the recent success of Reddit-fuelled stocks.
Dogecoin, which is based on the popular ‘doge’ meme, saw huge increases after a Reddit thread called SatoshiStreetBets called for the currency to reach the value of $1 per coin.
Again, cryptocurrency fan Musk has touched on the dogecoin, with many Reddit users calling on him to help spread the word about the currency.
Back in April 2019, he tweeted, ‘Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency. It’s pretty cool,’ later sending its value soaring by 20% when he simply tweeted, ‘doge.’
If you have a story you want to tell, send it to UNILAD via story@unilad.com
Emma Rosemurgey is an NCTJ trained Journalist who started her career by producing The Royal Rosemurgey newspaper in 2004, which kept her family up to date with the goings on of her sleepy north east village. She graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and started her career in regional newspapers before joining Tyla (formerly Pretty 52) in 2017, and progressing onto UNILAD in 2019.
Almost every time the price of bitcoin increases or decreases quickly, Coinbase shuts down. It happens like clockwork, time and time again. Why does Coinbase always go down? Instead of specifically focusing on why Coinbase always crashes, in this video we will go over a simple fix to prevent yourself from being a victim in the future when your exchange of choice crashes or your account is disabled/frozen. Time Stamps: Intro – 0:00 History Of Crashes – 0:15 The Solution- 1:00 Alternative Exchanges – 2:00
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In an investment industry known for big egos, overconfident analysts and “activists” who routinely tell CEOs how to run their companies, investor Nancy Zevenbergen and her team of four portfolio managers differentiate themselves by simply listening.
Zevenbergen, 61, founder of $5.7 billion (assets) Zevenbergen Capital Investments, believes the crucial job of an investor in today’s economy is to uncover the next great entrepreneur or technological innovation early on. The style is about “optimism and a view toward what the future might be,” she says. According to Zevenbergen, her task is to be curious and “understand the ‘crazy’ visions of new leaders and become investors alongside them.” If she likes a company, her Seattle-based firm will load up and watch from the sidelines, tracking the business patiently and holding their shares so long as growth doesn’t stall. Rarely do they worry too much about valuation.
This humble approach to investing has yielded results that make Zevenbergen among the best investors in the world. She has stuck by mercurial Elon Musk and owned Tesla for about a decade; Tesla’s stock is up 730% this year, and is the top performing stock of the ten years. She discovered Ottawa, Canada-based ecommerce company Shopify and its founder CEO Tobi Lütke in late 2016 when it was trading below $50; it now trades for $1,170.
Last September, Zillow chief executive Rich Barton decided the real estate platform would begin buying homes, leading to complaints from skeptics who sent its shares cratering 20% to below $30. Zevenbergen’s team liked Barton’s experimentation and built a large position. Fifteen months later, Zillow now trades for $140.
Seattle-based Nancy Zevenbergen calls investing with a less than five-year time frame “truly speculative.” Case in point: She’s owned Amazon since it traded in the $60s and still holds shares after a 90-fold rise. Tim Pannell for Forbes
With stock-picks like these, Zevenbergen’s Innovative Growth Fund (SCATX) and Genea Fund (ZVGNX) are up a staggering 126% and 154%, respectively, in 2020. Of over 1,000 peer funds tracked by Morningstar, the two mutual funds rank in the top percentile.
Zevenbergen created her firm from her living room in the late 1980s with just $500,000 in assets while she nursed a young child. Her flagship strategy has beaten the S&P 500 Index by around four percentage points annually since 1987, but 2020 was a watershed. Assets more than doubled soaring towards $6 billion, based on performance and inflows to her mutual funds.
Zevenbergen is not the only woman fund manager who has crushed competition in 2020. Forbes found at least a half a dozen firms led by women-led funds that have blown away their peers and drawn in tens of billions of dollars in assets collectively since the start of January.
Cathie Wood, founder of Ark Investments, had the best year of anyone. In 2014, Wood, 65, created Ark with the idea of packaging stock-picking into tax-efficient exchange traded funds, and focusing exclusively on breakthrough innovations in genomics, robotics, financial technology, autonomous driving, digital services, and artificial intelligence.
Six years later, Ark manages nearly $44 billion in assets, up from just $300 million at the end of 2016. This year, Ark funds have pulled in over $10 billion in new assets, led by extraordinary returns. Her flagship Ark Innovation Fund (ARKK) has seen assets soar to $17 billion, fueled by a 154% gain in 2020 and a 46% average annual return over the past five years. Her $6 billion Ark Genomic revolution ETF is up even more this year. “I wanted individual investors to catch the wave,” says Wood of today’s enormous technological change. Her funds were designed for those “willing to step out and away from fixed income and into some of the most exciting stocks in history.”
Ark publishes its financial models, trading logs, and research to the investing public, and the firm’s analysts are happy to engage in discussion on Twitter, opening themselves to criticism and mockery. Wood’s $4,000 a share valuation of Tesla a year ago drew many scoffs on Wall Street. But her heady valuation was spot on. Short sellers have been burned by Tesla’s rise, while female investors like Zevenbergen and Wood have been patient bulls. On Friday, Tesla was added to the S&P 500 Index.
Female investing success in 2020 extends well beyond soaring growth stocks. Women-run funds are leading the way in everything from small cap stocks, to emerging market debt portfolios, dividend paying companies, and sustainable investments.
Amy Zhang, portfolio manager of the Alger Small Cap Focus Fund (AOFIX) and Mid Cap Focus Fund (AFOIX) was hired in 2015 to expand Alger’s presence in niche small and mid-cap stocks. When Zhang arrived at Alger, the Small Cap Focus Fund had just $16 million in assets. Now, after a 54% return in 2020 and a 30% annual average return over the past five years, Zhang’s Small Cap Focus Fund has $7.5 billion in assets.
Top holdings include refrigerated logistics upstart CryoPort and fast casual restaurant Wingstop. Her Mid Cap Focus Fund, launched in mid-2018, has attracted over $500 million in assets as it has soared by 84% in 2020, bolstered by casino operator Penn National Gaming and power equipment manufacturer Generac.
Long before sustainable investments became a prolific buzzword, Karina Funk, an MIT-educated engineer at Baltimore-based mutual fund giant Brown Advisory, was a pioneer in bringing sustainable investments mainstream. Funk, 48, a vegetarian who watches her carbon footprint by biking to work, launched the Brown Advisory Sustainable Growth Fund in June 2012, alongside David Powell, with a goal to back about 35 companies with products improving social and environmental sustainability, or efficient operating footprints.
Its focus on companies like Ball Corp. and American Tower has made it one of the best funds on the planet during down markets. Even in 2020, the fund has gained 38% despite its defensive posture, thanks to savvy picks like life sciences conglomerate Danaher and Etsy, which has empowered many small businesses during the pandemic. Funk can be a tough customer. She exited Facebook in the fall of 2018 due to data privacy concerns.
“Sustainability is a means, not an end in and of itself,” she told Forbesas part of a profile three years ago, when the fund’s assets were just $1.1 billion. “Our end goal is performance. We achieve that by finding fundamentally strong companies using sustainability strategies to get even better.” The fund’s assets have since soared to $4.6 billion.
Other female-led funds that have done well include Capital Group’s $128 billion American Funds New Perspective (ANWPX), led by a team of managers including Joanna Jonsson and Noriko Chen, and the $36 billion in assets JPMorgan Equity Income Fund (HLIEX), led by Clare Hart. The New Perspectives fund has beaten its benchmark by four percentage points annually over the past decade, while Hart’s Equity Income Fund has returned an annualized 11.65%, two percentage points annually above its benchmark, according to data from Morningstar.
Rebecca Irwin, Natasha Kuhikin and Kathleen McCarragher of the $1.3 billion in assets PGIM Jennison Focused Growth Fund (SPFAX) have returned 68% in 2020 and 25% over the past five years, ranking in the top decile of peer funds. At Alger, Ankur Crawford, co-manager of the Alger Spectra Fund (ASPIX) and Alger Capital Appreciation (ACCAX) has seen returns surpass 40% this year.
In fixed income, Tina Vandersteel of the $4.4 billion in assets GMO Emerging Country Debt Fund (GMCDX) has been able to outperform emerging market bond indices despite underweighting China and many Gulf-states due to her skepticism of the veracity of their economic data.
The bull market of 2020 is also creating new opportunities for female fund managers to shine. Two years ago, Julie Biel of Los Angeles-based Kayne Anderson Rudnick, was a rising star at the $30 billion (assets) firm and excited about the looming public offering of software company DocuSign. Known for investing in established businesses, Kayne had never participated in an IPO. Biel was late in her pregnancy as the IPO progressed and trying to win an allocation. She needed a doctor’s note to fly to the Bay Area to meet with DocuSign’s management. Kayne eventually won a large block of shares, quickly becoming one of its largest outside investors.
Biel also began to manage the firm’s KAR Small Mid- Sustainable Growth strategy around that time and made DocuSign the fund’s top holding. Its shares have risen 225% in 2020. This year, Biel’s fund has returned 42% through November. In December, Kayne decided to launch a mutual fund version, launching the strategy, called the Virtus KAR Small-Mid Cap Growth Fund (VIKSK), with Biel in charge.
Like Zevebergen and Wood, Biel is starting small and manages just $60 million. But the investment industry rewards performance above all, hinting at much larger things to come. Entering 2021, Biel’s portfolio is loaded with hidden gems like Ollie’s Bargain Outlet and MarketAxess that could grow for years to come. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Send me a secure tip.
I’m a staff writer and associate editor at Forbes, where I cover finance and investing. My beat includes hedge funds, private equity, fintech, mutual funds, mergers, and banks. I’m a graduate of Middlebury College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and I’ve worked at TheStreet and Businessweek. Before becoming a financial scribe, I was a member of the fateful 2008 analyst class at Lehman Brothers. Email thoughts and tips to agara@forbes.com. Follow me on Twitter at @antoinegara
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Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency in the world, launched in 2009. It is also the first wide-scale, real-world application of blockchain technology. Bitcoin (BTC) is a decentralised network which uses a public ledger to approve transactions, eliminating the need for third party approval (such as a bank). It also operates free of a governing body, such as a central bank, and all changes in the network require consensus from its members.
While initially BTC value was extremely low, priced at fractions of cents, it picked up steam over the years, reaching price levels in the thousands of dollars for a single Bitcoin token and a market cap in the hundreds of billions. The Bitcoin chart often displays extreme volatility, having short-term price spikes and tumbles. Sometimes, when the Bitcoin price is on the rise, more people are inclined to buy Bitcoin, fueling its positive run further.
On the other hand, when the Bitcoin value is on the decline, it can prompt existing investors to sell their Bitcoin and push prices down. Moreover, Bitcoin is considered the bellwether of the cryptocurrency space, so it can often generate industry-wide trends.
Get the facts about trading Bitcoin before you start. Discuss investment strategies, review market research, and get real-time updates. Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency in the world, launched in 2009. It is also the first wide-scale, real-world application of blockchain technology.
While initially BTC value was extremely low, priced at fractions of cents, it picked up steam over the years, reaching price levels in the thousands of dollars for a single Bitcoin token and a market cap in the hundreds of billions.
The Bitcoin chart often displays extreme volatility, having short-term price spikes and tumbles. Sometimes, when the Bitcoin price is on the rise, more people are inclined to buy Bitcoin, fueling its positive run further. On the other hand, when the Bitcoin value is on the decline, it can prompt existing investors to sell their Bitcoin and push prices down. Moreover, Bitcoin is considered the bellwether of the cryptocurrency space, so it can often generate industry-wide trends. Still not sure if you should invest? Read more below
Read more about Bitcoin
Who should include Bitcoin in their portfolios?
Cryptocurrency traders: Bitcoin is the most well-known cryptocurrency, and therefore, many crypto traders buy it as part of their cryptocurrency portfolio.
Long-term investors: While still considered an extremely volatile and risky market, Bitcoin has shown tremendous price increases over time. Therefore, those who believe the overall trend will be positive could consider a Bitcoin investment.
Day traders: BTC prices can often have significant price swings over the course of a few hours. Traders can try to take advantage of these movements in an attempt to generate short-term profits.
Blockchain enthusiasts: Since Bitcoin is the first major application of blockchain technology, those who have faith in the technology and its potential impact on the tech and financial industries, could consider buying Bitcoin.
Blockchain enthusiasts: Since Bitcoin is the first major application of blockchain technology, those who have faith in the technology and its potential impact on the tech and financial industries, could consider buying Bitcoin.
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For the first time ever, we are publishing the Forbes Crypto Awards. Not everyone will be happy they’re on the list. Fed chairman Jerome Powell takes the honors as our person of the year: In a pandemic year when the Fed printed so much stimulus money that the central bank saw its balance sheet nearly double in size, our Forbes Awards judge Anthony Pompliano of Morgan Creek Digital credits Powell with running a “$3 trillion marketing campaign for bitcoin.”
Here are our picks for the best products, the most intriguing people and the most interesting trends in crypto this year.
Our inaugural Forbes Crypto Awards were selected in consultation with Anthony Pompliano, who helps manage two crypto funds at New York City-based Morgan Creek, which has $1.5 billion in assets under management, as well as his own recently launched endeavor, Pomp Investments.
The Forbes Person Of The Year In Crypto: Jerome Powell
In an attempt to prevent the U.S. economy from collapsing under pandemic pressure, Powell had the U.S. Federal Reserve buy up a record amount of treasuries, effectively printing more than $3 trillion in new money and nearly doubling the central bank’s balance sheet. Venture firm Pantera Capital called the infusion “two centuries of debt in one month,” creating an environment in which previously skeptical investors including Wall Street whales like Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller started taking cryptocurrency seriously. “I think Jerome Powell did the things that he and his colleagues believed were the best things to do in the short term to mitigate pain from the pandemic and economic crisis,” says Pompliano. “But in the pursuit of mitigating short-term pain, they were highlighting for everyone, from retail investors to the largest institutions in the world, what was going to happen over the next decade or two.”
Best Product: Square’s Cash App
In August 2018, Jack Dorsey’s payments giant Square, now valued at $96 billion, was among the first mainstream enterprises to allow bitcoin purchases in all 50 states. Bitcoin has proved a real boon to the company, which generated $1.6 billion in revenue from the asset in the third quarter, an 11-fold increase year over year. “I tend to think that new users give a good signal for something that is usable,” says Pompliano. “Not just by the crypto enthusiasts but by the everyday person, the mainstream.”
Most Intriguing Newcomer: Michael Saylor
Among a slew of names that bought bitcoin for the first time this year, perhaps none were more surprising, or made a bigger impact, than the CEO of struggling MicroStrategy, a Tysons Corner, Virginia-based business software firm. Over the course of five months starting in August, Saylor revealed that his smallish outfit, which competes against giants like Oracle and SAP in data analytics, had bought $475 million worth of bitcoin. That made bitcoin the publicly traded company’s biggest treasury asset. While Citi recently downgraded MicroStrategy as a result of the extremely aggressive play, Pompliano thinks it’s exactly that audacity that makes Saylor so intriguing. “He came out of nowhere,” says Pompliano. “And he has not only lit the bitcoin and crypto world on fire, but he has very quickly ascended to be one of the top bulls in the way he talks about what he’s doing. There’s no hedging in the way he talks about it; there’s no surrender.”
Disruptive Innovator: Caitlin Long
This former head of Morgan Stanley’s pension advisory group was once a rising star in traditional finance. Then, after helping write cryptocurrency-friendly laws in her home state of Wyoming, she was unanimously approved for one of the state’s new bitcoin banking charters in October. “She is disrupting the traditional regulatory framework,” says Pompliano. “And obviously, she was very instrumental there. But then to go build a company, to leverage those rules? I look at that as disruptive in a unique way.”
Outstanding Firm: Ark Invest
After experimenting with many different crypto strategies over the years, Ark’s CEO and chief investment officer Catherine Wood has shuffled most of her ETF firm’s direct bitcoin exposure into a single fund dedicated to “innovative” assets. But a number of other Ark ETFs have indirect exposure in the form of stakes in Silvergate Bank, which banks cryptocurrency businesses; Square and PayPal, which let their customers use bitcoin; and Nvidia, the Santa Clara, California-based computer chip manufacturer whose hardware has long been favored by many bitcoin miners. It’s working: Wood’s flagship fund is up 150% this year, and Ark’s assets under management have skyrocketed to $15 billion. “Cathie is one of those people who she’s not known just for bitcoin, so we kind of dilute her impact,” says Pompliano. “But she believed early; she was the first institution to really kind of go after the GBTC trade. She’s been right. She’s been right about a lot of stuff.”
Catherine Wood Eli Warren for Forbes
Annus Horribilis: Libra
Libra exploded onto the cryptocurrency scene in June 2019 when Facebook announced the project would use the blockchain to create a single asset backed by a number of global currencies, including the dollar, the euro and the yen. The original idea was that the Libra would be managed by payments giants like Visa, PayPal, Mastercard and Stripe. But U.S. lawmakers pretty much immediately freaked out, calling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Capitol Hill to explain his work. Most of Facebook’s best-known payment partners quickly backed out.
After many compromises to the original vision, a watered-down—although possibly still successful—version of the currency, now called Diem and backed one-to-one by the U.S. dollar, is scheduled to launch next year. “They, me and everyone else underestimated how swiftly and how powerful regulators and governments can be when they decide to attack,” says Pompliano, who worked at Facebook 15 years ago. “In terms of the absolute height of promise, possibility, etc. to the current state, that delta, I don’t think that we’ve seen anything fall as hard as Libra.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images
Forbes Forecast: Bitcoin corporate treasuries
MicroStrategy purchased $475 million worth of bitcoin this year and now has plans to raise another $650 million to purchase more; Square invested about $50 million into the cryptocurrency; and New York City-based asset manager Stone Ridge revealed it owned $115 million worth of the asset. Now that financial giants like Northern Trust, managing $1 trillion worth of assets, have revealed plans to help institutional investors safely custody crypto, it’s a trend that is likely only going to continue. “I think that we will see very, very, very large companies—Fortune 100-, Fortune 500-type companies—putting bitcoin on their balance sheet in 2021,” says Pompliano.
I report on how blockchain and cryptocurrencies are being adopted by enterprises and the broader business community. My coverage includes the use of cryptocurrencies and extends to non-cryptocurrency applications of blockchain in finance, supply chain management, digital identity and a number of other use cases. Previously, I was a staff reporter at blockchain news site, CoinDesk, where I covered the increasing willingness of enterprises to explore how blockchain could make their work more efficient and in some cases, unnecessary. I have been covering blockchain since 2011, been published in the New Yorker, and been nationally syndicated by American City Business Journals. My work has been published in Blockchain in Financial Markets and Beyond by Risk Books and I am regularly cited in industry research reports. Since 2009 I’ve run Literary Manhattan, a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization dedicated to showing Manhattan’s rich literary heritage.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged cryptocurrency pioneer Ripple Labs, the firm that owns a majority of the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency, for allegedly raising $1.3 billion in an offering of unregistered “digital asset securities”–a huge sign U.S. regulators could ramp up oversight of the cryptocurrency space as the market surges to new highs.
According to the SEC’s complaint, Ripple, its cofounder Christian Larsen and CEO Bradley Garlinghouse raised capital to finance the firm’s business through an unregistered public offering of XRP tokens beginning in 2013.
The complaint, filed in Manhattan’s federal district court, also alleges that Larsen and Garlinghouse carried out personal unregistered sales of XRP totaling roughly $600 million.
As of 3 p.m. EST, the value of the XRP token had plunged roughly 12% over the last 24 hours, according to crypto data firm CoinMarketCap, wiping out more than $2 billion from the cryptocurrency’s market cap.
“It’s not just Grinch-worthy, it’s shocking,” Garlinghouse told Fortune when he warned of the impending lawsuit on Monday evening, later tweeting that Ripple, a San Francisco-based firm last valued at $10 billion in 2019, “is ready to fight” the suit. “It’s an attack on the entire crypto industry and American innovation.”
The SEC has largely cracked down on crowdfunded token sales, commonly referred to as initial coin offerings, but XRP is easily the largest cryptocurrency targeted by the SEC as a security; officials in 2018 declared ether and bitcoin were currencies and not securities because of their decentralized nature.
Crucial Quote
“We allege that Ripple, Larsen and Garlinghouse failed to register their ongoing offer and sale of billions of XRP to retail investors, which deprived potential purchasers of adequate disclosures about XRP and Ripple’s business and other important long-standing protections that are fundamental to our robust public market system,” said Stephanie Avakian, director of the SEC’s enforcement division on Tuesday.
Big Number
$653 billion. That’s the current market value of all the cryptocurrencies across the world, more than tripling this year alone, according to CoinMarketCap. At its peak in January 2018, the market was valued at more than $800 billion. XRP’s current market cap of $21.6 billion is bested only by ether ($71 billion) and bitcoin ($435 billion).
Key Background
Heightened regulatory scrutiny from nations such as South Korea triggered a near-85% crash in cryptocurrency prices in 2018, but the United States has been slow to issue broad-based regulation. Among the most vocal U.S. regulatory agencies when it comes to cryptocurrency, the SEC spent months drafting guidance it released in April 2019 about when and how cryptocurrencies may be classified as securities, but it’s been relatively quiet on the front ever since.
The suit against Ripple, however, could mean that’s set to change as the cryptocurrency market soars toward new highs during the pandemic. “There is more and more interest from a wide spectrum of people, both inside the crypto space as well as inside the traditional financial institutions who are asking us for guidance,” an SEC Commissioner told CoinDesk in October. “I think we’re going to be forced to confront that more and more in the coming years.”
What To Watch For
Competition–from the government. Though it has not committed to the idea, the Federal Reserve is exploring the possibility of debuting its own central bank digital currency, Goldman Sachs said in a Sunday note. Officials have warmed up to the idea of a central bank token “largely out of concern that wide adoption of alternative digital currencies could endanger financial stability, U.S. financial intermediaries and the Fed’s ability to influence financial conditions,” Goldman analysts led by Jan Hatzius said.
Tangent
During the pandemic many investors have flocked to cryptocurrency–and namely bitcoin–as a hedge against longer-term inflation concerns, which have escalated in the face of increased government spending for coronavirus relief measures. In a report released Monday, digital asset management firm CoinShares said cumulative investments into cryptocurrency funds have totaled about $5 billion so far this year, eclipsing the approximately $1.4 billion plowed into the space through the end of last year.
Chief Critic
“Other major branches of the U.S. government, including the Justice Department and the Treasury Department’s FinCen, have already determined that XRP is a currency,” Ripple Counsel Michael Kellogg said in a statement to Forbes, arguing that the currency designation means XRP transactions fall outside the scope of federal securities laws. “This is not the first time the SEC has tried to go beyond its statutory authority. The courts have corrected it before and will do so again,” he added.
I’m a reporter at Forbes focusing on markets and finance. I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I double-majored in business journalism and economics while working for UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School as a marketing and communications assistant. Before Forbes, I spent a summer reporting on the L.A. private sector for Los Angeles Business Journal and wrote about publicly traded North Carolina companies for NC Business News Wire. Reach out at jponciano@forbes.com.
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