Case Studies
Knowledge Discovery – Abstraction, Coding and Web Research

Data Analysis Services for reviewing more than 20,000 NASD and NYSE award cases

Challenge

We were approached by a leading Securities Arbitration Lawyer and Investment Advisor to go through more than 20,000 NASD and NYSE award cases.

Solution

The client wanted us to go over these award cases to analyze and investigate the fairness of the mandatory arbitration system imposed by the securities industry on all investors.

There were three phases/stages in this project:

Phase I – In this phase, we abstracted information from around 18,000 award cases for the years 1994-2004 and coded them into 95 pre-defined fields in an excel database. Each of the Brokerage Firms involved in the cases had to be given a specific coding.

Result – The project involved the marking of the relevant fields in the document and then entry of the relevant data into the database with 99.99% accuracy and speed.

Phase II – In the next phase we had to a full scale internet search on all the Brokerage firm involved in the arbitration awards from 1994-2004 to determine the following:

• The firms that were registered with NYSE.
• The firms that were registered with NASD.
• The firms that were registered with both NYSE and NASD.
• The firms that had ceased functioning and the year of their closure along with the URL/source from where the information was extracted.
• The firms that had either merged/amalgamated or acquired by another Brokerage Firm. For instance, if DLJ worked independently from 1994-1996 then it had to be coded as 'DLJ' for that time period. If it merged into CSFB in 1997 then it had to appropriately coded as 'CSFB' for cases awarded from 1997-2004.

Results – The main challenge of this phase was to find information about the firms that were not registered with either NASD or NYSE. We understood the requirements well. If we could not locate the firm via Google search then we went to specific state sites and found the required details.

Based on work executed by SunTec in these two phases, the client recently published a statistical analysis of 'how claimants fare in mandatory arbitration of securities disputes.'

Phase III – The client recently sent us around 500 NYSE award cases for the years 2004-2006 to analyse, abstract and code it in a similar fashion. The client is in the process of constructing a statistical analysis of the relevant period based on the work done by SunTec.