Dick Fuld's new game: penny stocks

Likes the market's feel

What is former Lehman Brothers chief Dick Fuld doing at an obscure brokerage house called Legend Securities?

That's what Roddy Boyd, formerly of Fortune and the New York Post, wants to know in a post on his Financial Investigator web site.

The fact that Fuld latched on with Legend was reported last month by Reuters, among others. The firm, based in Lower Manhattan just off Wall Street, was described in generic terms as a broker-dealer with trading and investment banking businesses.

But Boyd says the distance between Legend and Lehman, which Fuld ran for 14 years until its collapse in September 2008,  "is a lot more than the 4.1-miles Google Maps indicates."

Where Lehman catered to big companies and hard-hitting rich guys, Legend so far has done three investment banking deals with companies whose shares trade on the over-the-counter bulletin board. That's not exactly Fortune 500 territory, to put it mildly.

Boyd adds that it's not completely clear who owns Legend or how it makes money. What is clear, he says, is that some of the firm's brokers previously plied their trade at notorious bucket shops like A.S. Goldmen.

Though Legend's record is clean, he writes that it "is the penny-stock brokerage made modern."

For Fuld to land here, he continues, suggests Fuld hasn't recovered his wits since Lehman's collapse.

"Why else," Boyd asks, "would a man lend his name and honor to men whom he would not have let near his building just two short years ago?"