UBS ordered to pay investor $532,846 for overly risky portfolio

investmentnews.com:

Finra arbitrators ordered UBS Financial Services Inc. to pay a senior investor in Texas more than $500,000 for weighting her portfolio too heavily in unsuitable energy, real estate and financial securities.

Pamela J. Borders alleged that a UBS registered representative in a Dallas office of the firm recommended an unsuitable concentration of undiversified and over-leveraged “below-investment-grade securities, and did not advise [her] with respect to credit line balances to avoid margin calls and forced liquidations,” the July 3 arbitration award states.

A three-person Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. arbitration panel found UBS liable for $380,158 in compensatory damages and for 5% annual interest on the damages from the date Borders filed her claim on Aug. 9, 2022. The arbitrators ordered UBS to pay $152,063 in attorneys’ fees and $625 in filing costs.

The arbitrators also denied an expungement request by the UBS broker, David Ray Barnes, who continues to work for UBS in Dallas, according to his BrokerCheck profile.

Borders filed the claim individually and as a trustee of the Pamela J. Borders Regular Marital Trust. She originally requested $3.4 million in compensatory damages as well as punitive damages.

Even though his client won, her lawyer, Robert Wayne Pearce, said the award should have been bigger. He said the Finra arbitrators calculated net losses over the time that Barnes held the account from February 2016 through March 2020.

He said that instead, they should have focused on the losses Borders incurred from the period around the forced liquidation — from the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in February 2020 through March 2020.

“It was a poor decision,” said Pearce, owner of an eponymous law firm