FINRA: Financial Industry Regulatory Authority

FINRA is not a government agency but its rules bind every broker-dealer in the country, and its Regulatory Notices are where new obligations first appear with an effective date attached. Its disciplinary output is large: 625 actions in 2025 with $99.6 million in fines and disgorgement. Most of that is published in a monthly PDF roughly two months after the action date, so a firm that only reads press releases sees a small fraction.

What FINRA publishes

• Regulatory Notices (numbered YY-NN, e.g. 26-16), Information Notices, Special and Election Notices, Trade Reporting Notices
• Rule filings with the SEC (SR-FINRA-2026-019)
• News releases, mostly large fines and bars
• The monthly Disciplinary Actions report (PDF) and Disciplinary Actions Online
• The Annual Regulatory Oversight Report, now released in December

Cadence. Roughly 20 Regulatory Notices a year (25-19 was the last of 2025), a few Information Notices a quarter, two to four news releases a month, and one disciplinary PDF a month covering actions from about two months earlier.

What to treat as urgent

• Regulatory Notices with an effective date inside 90 days.
• Rule filings marked effective on filing (immediately effective SRO rule changes).
• AWCs (Letters of Acceptance, Waiver and Consent) against firms with a business model like yours; the fact patterns repeat.
• The Annual Regulatory Oversight Report, which lists the coming year's exam priorities.

Quirks worth knowing

• finra.org sits behind Cloudflare and rate-limits or challenges automated readers; the FeedBurner feeds are HTTP-only and hold ten items.
• No feed exists for disciplinary actions; the monthly PDF and the email list are the channels.
• Notice slugs mix date formats (information-notice-20260803 next to special-notice-031726).
• PDF folder dates do not match publication dates.

Subscribe at the source

• Notices RSS (all types, 10 items)
• Rule filings RSS
• News releases RSS
• Email subscriptions incl. monthly disciplinary reports
• Disciplinary Actions Online

Official site: finra.org