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Regulation Best Interest

The SEC standard requiring a broker-dealer recommending a security or strategy to a retail customer to act in that customer's best interest, without placing its own interests ahead.

Reg BI has four obligations: disclose the capacity, fees and conflicts; exercise reasonable diligence, care and skill; establish policies to identify and address conflicts, eliminating sales contests and quotas tied to specific products; and comply with documented procedures.

The care obligation has three parts that matter to active traders. A recommendation must be reasonable for some investors, reasonable for this particular one, and reasonable as a series, which is the hook used against churning and excessive options recommendations.

It is a recommendation standard, not an ongoing duty, and it stops short of the fiduciary-duty owed by advisers. Self-directed trading that a broker did not recommend sits outside it entirely, which is why order-entry-only platforms lean hard on that distinction.

Related: suitability, fiduciary-duty, form-crs, churning, broker-dealer

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