Stifel Financial Corp. keeps paying high-priced settlements to clients who claimed they were wronged by former star broker, Chuck Roberts, and most recently in July agreed to pay two sets of customers who recently sued the firm for almost $3.6 million.
Roberts and his former brokerage firm, Stifel Nicolaus & Co. Inc., for years have been facing scrutiny due to sales of structured products and structured notes, sophisticated but sometimes volatile investments for clients.
In total, Stifel Nicolaus has paid or is on the hook for close to a staggering $200 million in damages and settlements to former clients of Roberts. Roberts was barred last July from the securities industry by FINRA.
According to Roberts’ BrokerCheck report and work history, Stifel settled two claims last month involving the former star broker.
One group of clients, who last year filed a lawsuit with FINRA Dispute Resolution Services and claimed breach of fiduciary duty, negligence and other charges, received a settlement of $700,000, according to BrokerCheck.
In another lawsuit, clients alleged in 2023 similar charges to the lawsuit listed above and received a settlement of almost $2.9 million, according to BrokerCheck.
A spokesperson for Stifel did not return a phone call Monday to comment.
According to a tally by InvestmentNews of Roberts' BrokerCheck report, Stifel has paid $56.8 million in settlement money to clients who sued the firm and another $14.3 million to clients who won a 2024 arbitration case against the firm.
Stifel has gone to federal court to challenge the FINRA arbitration panel’s decision in March 2025 to award Roberts’ clients $132.5 million in damages in a gigantic claim; this year, a federal judge denied the firm’s motion to vacate that award.
The size of that FINRA award stunned the securities industry, and Stifel has been settling some client complaints ever since.
Roberts left Stifel last July and days later was barred from the securities industry. Roberts refused to appear to testify to FINRA, resulting in his being barred from the securities industry for failing to cooperate with the regulator. According to the FINRA order, he consented to FINRA’s findings without admission or denial.
The client complaints, in general, stem from losses linked to Roberts’ structured-note strategy, with customers claiming the strategy was not in their best interest or that Roberts had inaccurately described the products.
The performance of structured notes is typically tied to an underlying asset, such as a specific stock or an index such as the S&P 500 stock index.
FINRA in May said it was launching a formal review of how broker-dealers supervise concentrated client positions in some of the structured products market's most complex instruments.
The regulator said last month it would examine firm practices related to non-principal protected "worst-of" structured notes – a category that includes products where payoffs are tied to the worst-performing asset in a group of two or more reference assets.
FINRA said it has identified multiple instances in which representatives concentrated client assets in products carrying both a lack of principal protection and worst-of features, a combination it described as presenting "particularly complex features."
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