Barred Advisor Gets 21 Months in Prison for Cherry-Picking

Former financial advisor Jonathan Vincent Glenn of Greenwich, Connecticut, has been sentenced to 21 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, for defrauding investment clients of more than $2.7 million through a cherry-picking securities scheme.

Glenn, 55, was sentenced last week after pleading guilty to securities fraud in October, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut announced.

Glenn must serve the first six months of his supervised release in home confinement.

Cherry-picking is a fraudulent securities trading practice in which a broker or advisor allocates profitable trades to favored accounts, potentially including themselves, at the expense of other advisory clients.

Glenn owned Glenn Capital LLC, also known as GlennCap LLC, an investment advisory firm headquartered in Greenwich, providing clients with portfolio management services.

He managed all advisory clients’ accounts and was authorized to make trading decisions on each client’s behalf without seeking approval for each trade, according to the U.S. attorney.

Glenn placed trades on behalf of advisory clients, himself or family members by trading directly in individual accounts or by placing block trades in Glenn Capital’s omnibus account and allocating the block trades among individual accounts, according to the U.S. attorney, who cited court documents and statements.

Glenn defrauded clients by retroactively allocating profitable omnibus-account trades to favored clients, family and personal accounts, and unprofitable omnibus-account trades to non-favored-client accounts, prosecutors said.

When a block purchase of an equity increased in value in the hours after the purchase, Glenn generally realized the profits by selling the security, then allocated those profits to favored-client, family, firm and personal accounts, according to the U.S. attorney.