Personal Finance

Among the wide range of hacking techniques known collectively as social engineering, pretexting is a tactic that hinges on telling a compelling (and, spoiler alert, fake!) story.

With pretexting, hackers attempt to deceive their targets by establishing a false sense of trust. The hacker uses a fabricated story, or pretext, to get you to download malware, send money or share sensitive information, to name a few examples. As you can imagine, this is a very risky game with serious ramifications if the hacker is successful.

You probably wouldn’t dream of leaving piles of cash lying around your home. But many investors end up doing this with cash in their brokerage accounts. Uninvested cash is a potentially valuable part of your investment portfolio. So it pays to pay attention to it, especially when interest rates move up or down. You should know the facts about your uninvested cash, the different cash management programs available and questions to ask.

When securities are listed on a centralized exchange, such as the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, transaction information such as price and trade history is readily available to investors through the exchange. But how can you get information about bonds and other fixed income securities that are not listed on a national securities exchange? Information about these securities, known as over-the-counter (OTC) debt securities, is provided by TRACE^®—the Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine^®.

As an individual investor, there are several ways in which you can hold securities. Many investors hold them in “street name.” This means that the shares are registered with the issuer under the name of an intermediary, typically your brokerage firm, that maintains electronic, “book-entry” records showing you as the real or “beneficial” owner.

There’s a strategy for trading options that’s generating quite a bit of buzz: trading an option contract with zero days to expiration (0DTE). An online search will generate many results with information about this trading strategy, which has become more common recently as expirations in certain options have expanded to practically every day of the week. Though the topic is hot, selling and buying options with zero days to expiration can be risky.

Fraudsters are versatile when it comes to creating new pitches to separate targets from their money. Virtually any news item, positive or negative, can become a "hook" for a new scam—whether a natural disaster or the launch of a new product or company.

It starts innocuously enough: You receive a message through an encrypted messaging platform asking if your daughter can come to a birthday party. You don’t recognize the number and only have sons, so you write the sender back to let them know the message must have been misdirected. Thus begins an unexpected relationship that eventually reveals itself to be a stock scheme.

Women’s financial influence is growing, but they may not be making the most of their increased financial power.

If you had to come up with $2,000 to pay for an unexpected expense next month, could you get your hands on the money? Nearly a third of respondents to the 2021 National Financial Capability Study—30 percent to be exact—said they probably or certainly could not. That's where America Saves Week, which runs from February 27 through March 3, can help.

The SEC’s Office of Investor Education and Advocacy, the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) are updating this Investor Alert to warn investors of potential risks associated with self-directed Individual Retirement Accounts (self-directed IRAs). Self-directed IRAs allow investment in a broader—and potentially riskier—portfolio of assets than other types of IRAs. Those assets may include real estate, private placement securities, precious metals and other commodities, and crypto assets.