Brokerage Services
Our broker/dealer operates as a correspondent clearing client of Bear Stearns Securities Corp. (“Bear Stearns”). Bear Stearns provides our clients with a complete range of services and technologies. Bear Stearns holds our customer assets, provides our customers with statements and confirmations, clears our customer and proprietary trades, and provides us full access to their equity and fixed-income trading desks and research products.
The majority of services that our broker/dealer provides are for individual investors through a typical brokerage relationship. Generally, we hold our client’s assets (at Bear Stearns) and work in consult our clients on a range of investment ideas for which we earn commissions when they are acted upon. We have discretion over a limited number of our brokerage accounts.
We provide a variety of research and trading services to our institutional brokerage customers. In most cases we utilize Bear Stearns’ trading desks to buy and sell securities, however, as an independent broker/dealer we have the advantage of being able to transact with any firm’s trading desk in search of a better purchase or selling price for a client. Our cost structure allows us to trade at discounted commission rates as warranted.
- For the purposes of the Securities Investors Protection Act and the financial responsibility rules of the SEC, our broker/dealer clients are deemed to be customers of Bear Stearns as Westport Capital Markets’ clearing agent. As it does for all member firms, SIPC provides each of our client accounts with $500,000 of insurance, $100,000 of which protects cash. Furthermore, through our clearing firm Bear Stearns Securities Corp., each of our accounts is covered through an excess surety bond issued by CAPCO. The amount of this additional protection is unlimited per customer. It is the expressed policy of Westport Capital Markets not to pay third party brokers for order flow..