Goldman Sachs  said Thursday that its fourth-quarter earnings will take a roughly $1.5 billion hit as it has reached a nearly $5.1 billion settlement agreement in principle related to its “securitization, underwriting and sale of residential mortgage-backed securities (MBS) from 2005 to 2007.”

The bank said in a Thursday release that its agreement in principle will resolve actual and potential claims from the Department of Justice, the New York and Illinois Attorneys General, the National Credit Union Administration and the Federal Home Loan Banks of Chicago and Seattle.

The terms of the agreement say that Goldman will pay a $2.385 billion penalty, make $875 million in cash payments and provide $1.8 billion in consumer relief. The bank said that the relief will be partly composed of principal forgiveness for underwater homeowners and distressed borrowers.

Goldman will also contribute to construction financing, affordable housing, and debt restructuring support.

Shares of the Squid traded slightly negative in after-hours action.

The agreement in principle is still subject to final negotiation of the documentation, the bank said.

To read more, please visit MarketsMuse.com

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The growth of low-cost robo-advisors has made one thing clear to financial industry analysts: Human advisors who provide little more than investment advice have their work cut out for them.

“Advisors need to be more strategic about what they can offer clients,” said Will Trout, a senior analyst for research and consulting firm Celent. “Stock picking is a waste of time, and allocating has become a commodity because it can be executed by algorithms. So advisors have to operate at a much higher level and [address] a client’s unique situation,” he said, adding, “Otherwise, what are clients paying for?”

So-called robo-advisors are automated online investment advisory services. Along with providing automated, algorithm-based portfolio management advice, some of them offer automatic portfolio rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting.

Robo-advisors also charge less than the industry standard of 1 percent of assets managed for financial advisory services. And that, say analysts, is going to put pressure both on industry fees and on advisors themselves to justify fees that are higher than a robo’s.

To continue reading CNBC’s article on human advisors combatting robo-advisors, click here.

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In December, Brokerdealer.com covered the emerging bitcoin market and in January, MarketMuse profiled the Winklevoss twins’ plans to launch a bitcoin ETF. The bitcoin market is still emerging and was on track to be a booming business but the market now is taking a step back. In fact, UK International Business Times is saying that the bitcoin market is dying off, now with the supposed bitcoin scam occurring in Hong Kong, the bitcoin market seems to be even more hopeless.

Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange MyCoin has allegedly shut its doors and stolen HKD 3 billion ($386.9 million) in the process.

The South China Morning Post reported Monday that 30 MyCoin clients approached a local lawmaker with complaints that the company had fled with funds from up to 3,000 investors.

The reports coming out of Hong Kong would seem to indicate that there may have been a Ponzi scheme at play.

“No one seems to know who is behind this,” a woman surnamed Lau, who said she lost HKD 1.3 million, told the paper. “Everyone says they, too, are victims … but we were told by those at higher tiers [of the scheme] that we can get our money back if we find more new clients.”

One warning sign of a pending collapse could have been that when the company changed its trading rules to bar people from exchanging all of their bitcoins unless they solicited new investors for the firm.

As bitcoin-focused site CoinDesk reasons, the incident may lead to new regulations for the cryptocurrency industry in Hong Kong, “which has so far operated with little scrutiny.”

According to the SCMP, MyCoin had hosted events at luxury hotels and a roadshow in Macau in 2014.

MyCoin did not immediately return a request for comment.

For the entire article from CNBC, click here.

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For those spies and others seeking information about brokerdealers throughout Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East, BrokerDealer.com offers a global database of firms in all of these regions..

Here’s the fun video clip from CNBC

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