The MarketWatch team reviewed 387,260 surveillance alerts in 2015, resulting in 689 referrals to Finra for further review and drill-down on the activity at the brokerage firm level. Finra has its own proprietary market surveillance software, called Sonar, that it uses to identify activity for review. That surveillance is supplemented by the referrals and tips from customers, the public or exchanges like Nasdaq.
Cameron Funkhouser, the executive vice president in Finra’s Office of Fraud Detection & Market Intelligence, said in an interview said that they receive “all kinds of market intelligence from many sources. Between the surveillance and the investigation,” said Funkhouser, “we are going broad and deep, looking at who traded and when, down to the customer level, and which accounts made money.”
