California Corporate & Securities Law

The California Department of Business Oversight recently issued its annual Broker-Dealer/Investment Adviser report for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2017. The DBO reports that it had 3,808 investment adviser firms licensed at year end. These firms...

Last week, I cautioned the students in my Securities Regulation class that while it can be helpful to review the SEC filings of other registrants, one should never assume that they are correct. A few days later, I noticed that the following...

"Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . . ."

Last August, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted amendments to Form ADV, the form used by investment advisers to register with the SEC and with the states. Included in these amendments were changes to allow multiple private fund adviser...

In a previous post, I began to delve into the question of what is a "real estate fund".  See SEC Staff Reports On “Real Estate Funds”, But What Exactly Are They? As noted in that post, a "real estate fund" as defined in Form PF cannot be a company...

Yesterday, the SEC staff announced that it had published a suite of new data and analyses of private fund statistics and trends. These data include information with respect to "real estate funds". But what exactly is a "real estate fund"? The answer...

In 1990, California enacted the California Commodity Law, Stats. 1990, Ch. 969, Corp. Code § 29500 et seq.  Although this law hasn't attracted the attention of legal writers, it has some very sharp teeth, as illustrated by the recent case of People...

The California Department of Business Oversight recently issued a report on its Broker-Dealer/Investment Adviser Program. This report was required by the Budget Act of 2014. Although short, the report provides some interesting data about...