Banned Gold Coast adviser former ASIC employee

Yesterday, ifa reported that ASIC had banned a Gold Coast-based adviser from providing financial services for six years, saying the former director led clients to believe he had authority to engage in discretionary trading when he actually did not.

Rodney Peters of Mudgeeraba was a director of Australian Share Registry (ASR) and both he and ASR were authorised representatives of Pulse Markets between March 2015 and March 2016.

ifa was alerted to Mr Peters prior employment at ASIC, where he spent nine years and six months as a financial investigator.

ASICs statement yesterday did not reflect Mr Peters prior employment at the authority between 1991 and 2000, instead their statement said that Mr Peters had not complied with the law in engaging in excess of 1,000 options trades on behalf of clients between April 2015 and April 2016.

The authority also said that Pulse was not authorised to engage in discretionary trading, but “only to provide general advice and to trade in equities (options) and derivatives”.

Mr Peters was determined to have conducted options trading on behalf of his clients on a discretionary basis, without their authorisation and in breach of his authorisation from Pulse.

He was also found to misrepresent that he had the authority to engage in discretionary trading.

“ASIC found that Mr Peters was aware that he could not engage in discretionary trading but decided to do so, and further that his conduct was likely to cause clients to assume that he did have authority to engage in this kind of trading,” the regulator said.

Mr Peters has the right to appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal for a review of ASIC’s decision.

Eliot Hastie

Eliot Hastie is a journalist at Momentum Media, writing primarily for its wealth and financial services platforms. 

Eliot joined the team in 2018 having previously written on Real Estate Business with Momentum Media as well.

Eliot graduated from the University of Westminster, UK with a Bachelor of Arts (Journalism).

You can email him on: [email protected]