Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Miss EMMA Says, "Disclose It!"

Just a reminder to teach your Reps about disclosing 'material information' to customers (except institutional buyers--sophisticated muni market participants) when selling munis. Even if not recommended. The EMMA portal is the place to find most such information. And here is a link to FINRA's news release on the subject--don't forget to search for "material events" in my blog to be treated to some other useful information...like a reminder that this rule applies to 529 sales.

FINRA provided in the news release a 'checklist' for Reps to use as a means of documenting their notification efforts (necessary! always document!). It's pretty lengthy and for some reason I don't envision Reps reading it. But if they did, they would surely be enlightened: it's full of instructions and explanations and ultimatums and guilt trips (jk). You may want to put your brilliant word processing staffers to work on this in order to create a more user-friendly checklist (send it to me and I'll send you my thanks and maybe chocolates!).

Also, MSRB's Fact Sheet is a very lovely tool for educating your muni customers. I hope they don't mind me passing it along.

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