VENTURE CAPITAL POST

IEX Group, the start-up stock-trading venue featured in Michael Lewis' book "Flash Boys," hired a former New York Stock Exchange official as chief regulatory officer, the last piece of its senior management team as it moves to become an exchange later this year, the company said on Monday.

U.S. brokerage firms and financial advisers are a routine target of cyber criminals and some have lost money as a result of fraudulent emails requesting transfers of client funds, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said in a report.

Sales of "smart beta" funds, the fastest-growing segment of the exchange-traded fund market, are among the issues Wall Street's private watchdog will review in its 2015 examinations of U.S. brokerages, the regulator said on Tuesday.

Morgan Stanley (MS.N) said on Monday it had fired a financial adviser who allegedly stole account information from about 350,000 of its wealth management clients and posted some of it online.

A massive data collection system that Wall Street's industry-funded watchdog is pushing in order to ramp up oversight would cost clearing firms $680 million to build, plus other costs to the industry that far exceed the regulator's initial estimates, a major trade group said on Monday.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said it would be ramping up its efforts against brokers who sell high risk products like emerging market "frontier" funds to investors of lesser means, the Financial Times reported.

A Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration panel ordered the San Francisco-based brokerage unit of Wells Fargo & Co to buy back auction rate securities amounting to $94 million from its investors.

FINRA, in its oversight powers, is contemplating the imposition of a requirement of having insurance to cover payouts should the brokerage firm fail.

TradeKing Group Inc. announced receiving an approval from FINRA for its acquisition of GAIN Securities Inc. assets.

The shares of E*Trade plunged the most since April after the conduct of the Finra probe in two of its units.

FINRA will be submitting to the SEC a process to clear broker's records.