How this process
actually works.

FINRA — the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority — operates the arbitration forum in which most disputes between investors and brokerage firms are heard. FINRA's own overview page describes it this way:

“Arbitration is similar to going to court, but more efficient, cost effective, and less complex than litigation. It is a formal process where parties select a neutral third party, called an arbitrator, to resolve a dispute.” FINRA, Overview of Arbitration & Mediation

An arbitration ends in an award — a written decision — rather than a court judgment, and the grounds for challenging an award afterward are narrow. The overview page linked above is the place to read what the forum is and is not, in FINRA's own words.

This describes the process in general. It is not advice about your situation.

Two separate deadlines get confused constantly, including by people who should know better. They are different rules, from different sources, and they run independently.

Clock one — the forum's own eligibility window. FINRA Rule 12206 — Time Limitation: No claim is eligible for submission to arbitration where six years have elapsed from the occurrence or event giving rise to the claim. Rule 12206(c) states the rule does not extend applicable statutes of limitations. Rule 12206(b) provides that dismissal under the rule does not prohibit a party from pursuing the claim in court.

Clock two — the statute of limitations on the underlying claim. This is an eligibility rule for one forum, not a statute of limitations. The deadline that actually bars a claim is set by state law, varies by state and by the legal theory, is often shorter than six years, and cannot be determined from a transaction file. Only a lawyer in the relevant state can tell you what it is.

This describes the process in general. It is not advice about your situation.

FINRA publishes, on its Dispute Resolution Services statistics page, exactly how the cases in its forum end. Most do not end with an arbitrator deciding anything. The table below is FINRA's own closure breakdown, as published through June 2026:

The same page publishes how long cases take, by track. FINRA labels these figures “Turnaround Time (months)”, and that label — not any statistical claim beyond it — is all the page asserts:

* FINRA's footnote on the overall figure: “Includes cases closed for any reason.” Source: FINRA Dispute Resolution Services statistics. These are forum-wide counts of past cases. They are context about the forum as a whole — they say nothing about what will happen in any particular case.

This describes the process in general. It is not advice about your situation.

Smaller claims travel a different track. FINRA Rule 12800 — Simplified Arbitration sets the threshold in its first paragraph:

“This rule applies to arbitrations involving $50,000 or less, exclusive of interest and expenses.” FINRA Rule 12800(a)

One arbitrator, not three:

“All arbitrations administered under this Rule will be decided by a single public arbitrator appointed from the FINRA chairperson roster.” FINRA Rule 12800(b)

By default there is no hearing at all — the arbitrator decides on the written submissions. Rule 12800(c) opens: “No hearing will be held in arbitrations administered under this rule unless the customer requests a hearing.” It continues:

“If no hearing is requested, no initial prehearing conference or other prehearing conference will be held, and the arbitrator will render an award based on the pleadings and other materials submitted by the parties.” FINRA Rule 12800(c)

A customer who does want to be heard chooses between two formats — a full regular hearing, or a shortened “special proceeding” held by telephone or video:

“If the customer requests a hearing, the customer must select between one of two hearing options under this Rule. (A) Option One — the regular provisions of the Code relating to prehearings and hearings, including all fee provisions. (B) Option Two — a special proceeding, subject to the regular provisions of the Code relating to prehearings and hearings, including all fee provisions, except as modified by subparagraphs (i) through (viii) of this paragraph;” FINRA Rule 12800(c)

What filing costs on this track is set by FINRA Rule 12900(a)(1). The fee schedule's header reads “Amount of Claim (exclusive of interest and expenses)” / “Filing Fee”; the bands at or under $50,000 are:

Rule 12900(c) provides a partial refund of the filing fee only where a case is settled or withdrawn more than 10 days before a hearing. Source: FINRA Rule 12900.

This describes the process in general. It is not advice about your situation.

Brokerage statements and trade confirmations already contain the numbers that regulators and arbitrators look at when they examine trading activity. Three of them recur:

• Turnover — how many times, on an annualized basis, the account's holdings were replaced by new purchases. It is computed from the purchases in the record against the account's average value.
• Costs — commissions, fees, and margin interest, summed and compared against the account's value, so that the record shows what annual return the account needed just to break even.
• Holding periods — how long positions were held between purchase and sale. A record of many short holds reads very differently from a record of a few long ones.

These are not invented yardsticks. FINRA's Regulatory Notice 18-13 states the guidepost its own examiners use:

“A turnover rate of six or a cost-to-equity ratio above 20 percent generally is indicative of excessive trading.” FINRA Regulatory Notice 18-13

That sentence describes an industry-wide guidepost, not a verdict on any account — the same notice makes clear the determination depends on the customer's own investment profile. The statement analyzer on this site computes annualized turnover, median holding period, and the cost figures directly from an uploaded statement file, locally, and cites the authority behind each yardstick it reports.

This describes the process in general. It is not advice about your situation.

BrokerCheck is FINRA's free public record of brokers and brokerage firms: registrations, employment history, and disclosure events reported on the industry's own forms. Its investment-adviser counterpart is the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure site. Both are primary sources — the place a record either exists or does not.

A clean page is weaker evidence than it looks. Where this site's reports find no disclosure events, they carry this banner, verbatim:

“This record shows no disclosure events. A record showing no complaints can still hide erased history: FINRA arbitrators can order events expunged from the CRD system, and an expunged event leaves no marker. Published studies report high grant rates for expungement requests (Honigsberg & Jacob, "Deleting misconduct: The expungement of BrokerCheck records," Journal of Financial Economics, 2021; PIABA Foundation expungement studies) — those figures describe the studies' samples, not this person.” Aletheus's expungement banner, shown wherever a record is clean

For industry-wide context: Egan, Matvos & Seru, “The Market for Financial Adviser Misconduct” (NBER Working Paper 22050), reports: “Seven percent of advisers have misconduct records, and this share reaches more than 15% at some of the largest advisory firms” and “Prior offenders are five times as likely to engage in new misconduct as the average financial adviser.” Those are base rates about the industry as a whole. They are never a probability about any particular adviser, and no page on this site uses them that way.

This describes the process in general. It is not advice about your situation.

First consultations run on documents. The intake used by this site's report builder mirrors what securities counsel commonly ask a new client to gather, and the same checklist works on paper:

• Who — the representative's name exactly as printed on statements, any CRD number (the industry ID shown on BrokerCheck), the firm's name, and the branch city and state.
• When — when the relationship started and ended, when the account was opened (the date that anchors the six-year arithmetic of FINRA Rule 12206), and when the loss was discovered.
• What was bought — tickers or product names and purchase dates, the account type, and what was said about risk tolerance — including that it was never discussed, which is itself a meaningful answer.
• The paper — account statements, trade confirmations, the account agreements, and any correspondence: letters, emails, and text messages with the representative or the firm.
• Case identifiers, if any exist — an arbitration case number, a court docket number, or a regulator's case number, each of which unlocks a specific public record.

In this site's own intake, every client fact in that list — dates, purchases, account details, files — is classified local-only: it stays on the machine and never rides in any outbound query.

This describes the process in general. It is not advice about your situation.

A downloaded record is just a file until two questions are answered: is it really what it claims to be (authentication), and can anyone prove it has not changed since it was saved (integrity)? The Federal Rules of Evidence answer the first for electronic records copied from a source, in Rule 902(14) — quoted verbatim from the official uscourts.gov text:

“(14) Certified Data Copied from an Electronic Device, Storage Medium, or File. Data copied from an electronic device, storage medium, or file, if authenticated by a process of digital identification, as shown by a certification of a qualified person that complies with the certification requirements of Rule 902(11) or (12). The proponent also must meet the notice requirements of Rule 902(11).” Fed. R. Evid. 902(14)

In plain English: an exact copy of a file can authenticate itself, without a live witness, when a qualified person certifies that a process of digital identification — in practice, a hash — shows the copy matches the original. A hash is a fingerprint for a file. NIST's forensics guidance explains why it works:

“Computing the message digest of the copied data can be used to verify and ensure data integrity. A message digest is a hash that uniquely identifies data and has the property that changing a single bit in the data will cause a completely different message digest to be generated.” NIST Special Publication 800-86, §4.2.2

Two cautions ride with this. Authentication is all the rule does — the Advisory Committee Notes to the 2017 amendment state: “A certification under this Rule can establish only that the proffered item has satisfied the admissibility requirements for authenticity. The opponent remains free to object to admissibility of the proffered item on other grounds—including hearsay, relevance, or in criminal cases the right to confrontation.” And a hash list by itself is not the certification — the certification is a signed statement by a qualified person, chosen by counsel. This is why the evidence bundles this site assembles fingerprint every file with SHA-256 (the hash function specified in FIPS PUB 180-4), keep the original files untouched beside the copies, and include 902(14) and 902(13) certification drafts whose blanks stay blank until a qualified person completes and signs them.

This describes the process in general. It is not advice about your situation.