Free Republic

How corrupt is the United States? The day after the Justice Department launched an investigation into Wall Street short sellers the largest document storage facility, TD Ameritrade Bartlett Warehouse, went up in flames.

The Bartlett Warehouse fire seems to be a records storage facility owned by TD Ameritrade Inc. The retail community finds it incredibly suspicious since the incident occurred after the SEC announced 60 hedge funds were to undergo investigations for manipulative short selling. The address of the Bartlett Warehouse fire can be traced through SEC reports below. The warehouse caught fire on Thursday morning, February 3rd. Officials say the warehouse was stacked floor to ceiling with boxes of documents which further fueled the fire, via ABC7 Chicago. The Bartlett Fire Chief anticipates the fire to be a multi-day event. The cause...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ted Cruz have become an unlikely odd couple in calling for hearings over trading app Robinhood’s blocking of investors seeking to buy GameStop shares– and it has AOC scrambling for cover. In a series of tweets posted Thursday, following wild price swings orchestrated by traders on Reddit, Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called Robinhood’s actions “unacceptable.” “We now need to know more about @RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit,” the progressive pol wrote. “As a member of the Financial Services Cmte,...

SAN FRANCISCO & OMAHA, Neb.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Charles Schwab Corporation (“Schwab”) and TD Ameritrade Holding Corporation (“TD Ameritrade”) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement for Schwab to acquire TD Ameritrade in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $26 billion. Under the agreement, TD Ameritrade stockholders will receive 1.0837 Schwab shares for each TD Ameritrade share, which represents a 17% premium over the 30-day volume weighted average price exchange ratio as of November 20, 2019. Schwab President and CEO Walt Bettinger said, “We have long respected TD Ameritrade since our early days pioneering the discount brokerage industry, and...

The race to the zero-bound is on. That’s not an interest-rate policy development, but an investing fee trend. Charles Schwab Corp SCHW, -2.41% on Tuesday said it would no longer charge a commission on trades of U.S. and Canada-listed stocks, exchange-traded funds, and options, starting October 7. That’s just the latest volley in the incredible shrinking broker fee war. Behemoth asset managers like Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab have spent the past few years leapfrogging each other to offer lower and lower commissions. That’s thanks in part to the rise in popularity of ETFs, funds that in most cases passively follow...

Discount brokerage Scottrade is being acquired by rival TD Ameritrade in a $4 billion deal. The companies announced the deal early Monday, following several weeks of news reports about the merger. The sale is subject to regulatory approvals, and is slated to close by Sept. 30, 2017. Scottrade will convert to TD Ameritrade systems in 2018. Combined, the two companies have $944 billion in total client assets and 10 million funded client accounts. "It gives us a lot of power to combine the two," Scottrade's founder and CEO Rodger Riney told the Post-Dispatch Monday. "It is a business that has...

Third World hackers are sneaking into E*Trade and TD Ameritrade online stock-trading accounts and looting them in a massive pump, dump and run scheme. Scammers from Eastern Europe and Asia are targeting the online traders in one of the biggest cases of identity theft to strike the U.S. securities industry. In a conference call last week, E*Trade said it spent $18 million in the third quarter to compensate customers affected by trading fraud. TD Ameritrade said it also suffered losses because of bogus trading by unauthorized users who pried their way into customer accounts, but declined to specify an amount....