Last December, 20 years after the launch of Mad Money with Jim Cramer, Canadian securities regulators felt the need to issue guidance about FINFLUENCERS and how securities regulation applies to them. Finfluencers are people who engage in stock picking and/or stock promotion activities online or on social media. I don’t mind if regulators throw the book at fraudsters, but feeling the need to publish this guidance is just another example of regulators justifying man-hours and expanding their empires.
If the regulators really wanted to be consequential, they could apply pressure on the social media platforms - the tech giants which finfluencers depend on. I read a recent report that $7B or around 10% of Meta ad revenues are from clearly deceptive scam ads. Now, there’s a meaty problem the government could go after. But it’s much easier to bully some guy talking about stocks on TikTok.
Probably the most well-known finfluencer at the moment is Amber Kanwar. On her website, Amber calls herself, “Canada’s most trusted and recognizable business journalist.” She has already landed several of the biggest financial institutions in the country as sponsors, less than a year after starting her podcast. Per my analysis, as detailed below, she has violated securities regulations in several instances - that's how easy it is to trip on these pointless laws.
Please note I am not picking on Amber, though I accept that I am offering her as a test case of the regulator's seriousness. The upside is that if she gets leniency, that sets a precedent all the smaller finfluencers can use as a shield. You can trust I am squarely focused on the OSC, because I am a committed free speech absolutist. I believe all these licensing regulations, whether they try to regulate investment advice, legal advice or even psychotherapy are a needless infringement on free speech. Like many effective entrepreneurs, Amber probably operates on the "move fast, break things" principle.
One very basic aspect of finfluencer compliance (in Canada) is that anyone can provide stock-picking advice provided it is not tailored to the needs of a specific investor - in which case, no license needed. However, there's a twist: you have to disclose any financial interest in the security you recommend. (I am simplifying things a bit.) In Ontario, this is all codified in section 34 of the Ontario Securities Act. Although the "finfluencer" guidance is new, section 34 has been on the books for decades.
In a "pledge" posted on her website, Amber says: "I will always disclose verbally if we are discussing a stock that I own."
(Please note that I provided a draft of this post to Amber prior to publication and she has since modified her pledge.) In any event, her pledge is irrelevant to my analysis - the law obligates her to disclose. To be 100% accurate, Amber operates through a limited company, AK Media, but the responsibilities ultimately falls on her (even though she is generally just interviewing and not herself making recommendations). I am skipping the nuances, but the essence of it is that her business has to be looked as a whole.
In the little sampling I have done, Amber just doesn't seem to take her disclosure obligations seriously. I asked her but she did not provide any instance where she did disclose a holding. However, in her year-end review last month, she mentioned that she had been a long-standing investor in Google/Alphabet, but that she decided to sell when her guest Dan Niles made bearish comments on it. This is the smoking gun I needed (to put the OSC in an awkward position, I hasten to add).
I copy a slide from Amber's year-end show that mentions the 3 instances in 2025 when Alphabet was profiled as a "Pro Pick". I have annotated this slide in red with the dates these shows aired and the date Dan Niles made bearish comments on the stock. Dan Niles came after the three pro-Google guests. We can therefore conclude that Amber's show recommended Alphabet as a top pick on 3 occasions, while she was a shareholder.
Did she, as the Ontario Securities Act requires, disclose her stake? I have reviewed all the relevant clips and she does not make any such disclosures. I don't want to waste your time posting lengthy video clips, but here's an excerpt from her website, where she documents this Pro Pick, without the required disclosures.
I am confident in saying, based on what I have sampled and my legal analysis, that she has at least a few other disclosure failings, besides Alphabet. Another problematic area is a new segment she launched to promote ETFs, on a sponsored basis. After I informed Amber of her deficient disclosures, she tweeted out a "policy update", including updating her ETF Minute segments. I believe her new ETF Minute segments, even after revisions, still fall short of the guidance, which requires some specificity, including naming the recipient of any payments.
In the pledge I pasted above, Amber writes: "I am never paid to discuss specific securities on the show." and also "I do not receive payment from guests." However, the ETF Minutes see her discussing ETFs, sometimes with a guest from the sponsoring issuer. Having such inconsistencies on her website leaves her exposed to the legally more fraught terrain of misrepresentations and deceptive marketing. Regulations also place some of the burden of ensuring compliance on the issuers, but that is not an issue I have examined closely.
Spare a thought as well for award-winning Globe journalist Tim Kiladze, with a Master of Science degree in Journalism from the prestigious Columbia University, who saw fit to print this about Amber:
Financial influencers, or “finfluencers,” have exploded in popularity, but sometimes they’re advertisers (or self-promoters) first, and journalists second.
“It’s dangerous for marketers to deploy money and then find out someone is talking their own book,” she said, referring to influencers or media personalities who promote or slam stocks but do not disclose whether they have bought or shorted the securities, and therefore have a personal agenda. Ms. Kanwar, meanwhile, was raised with ethical guidelines at BNN, where investments disclosures are mandatory and there is a journalistic rigour to the approach.
Securities regulations in this area are not concerned with whether you talk about a safe utility stock or a speculative uranium mining stock. They are concerned with process and disclosures, not outcomes. The guidance talks about two finfluencers who have already gotten in trouble and paid fines. Their violations were disclosure violations. The latest case they cite is Re Floreani, which involves a group of sociopathic parasites, formally known as the Alberta Securities Commission, against this strapping young man:
Now, where morality is concerned, James did promote some speculative stocks, so that’s no good, obviously. But bad stock recommendations happen about a billion times every day online. However, where the law is concerned, his only failing was to make inadequate disclosures. Including over such minutiae as whether his disclosures should have been at the beginning or at the end of documents. Or whether a disclosure that required viewers to click "more" to become visible was conspicuous enough. For these violations, he had to pay $40k in penalties. He had to stop engaging in investor relations activities for two years, something which seemed to have been a good source of income for him. And he can't even give his opinions on stocks during that ban - a rather drastic restriction on his freedoms. There's an ocean of grift going on, people have needlessly lost tens of billions in what is otherwise a raging bull market and the regulators waste time going after small fish like this over disclosure failings.
To add insult to injury, the ASC in its press release celebrating this "big win" says:
Floreani presented himself as knowledgeable and sophisticated in finance and investment, demonstrating familiarity and competence with the relevant terminology, but in reality, he did not have any formal education in finance or investing.
This is an idiotic statement to make on many levels. Are people without "formal education" supposed to appear incompetent, so that they don't deceive others? There is no royal road to investment prowess, Twitter has done more for me than a finance degree or the CFA. Ironically, James has a degree in journalism, just like Amber! The Globe, of course, breathlessly reported the sanction and repeated the line about his lack of "formal education". In the Amber piece, does the Globe point at her lack of "formal education" in finance or investing? I think she might have done the Canadian Securities Course.
One reason the regulator could make an absurd statement like that is because they are overrun by lawyers, rather than people with experience in the markets. Further, his educational proficiency is not a relevant consideration for the regulator. Legally, he only had disclosure obligations. Why do they use the power of the state to disparage an individual over an irrelevant consideration? This betrays the bias these people have. They bully small players, while they protect sophisticated scam artists who play by their ineffective rules, know how to talk and dress and retain the right lawyers. James used a "generalist" commercial lawyer to defend himself - not a serious securities lawyer. Most of the case was based on his own admissions. He was defenceless.
As for Amber, I first emailed her questions about disclosures on January 2nd and then sent her the finfluencer guidance and section 34 of the Ontario Securities Act. On January 15th, I sent her a draft of this post. She replied that she would review with her lawyers and get back to me. She never did, but on Monday the 18th, she tweeted this "policy update", in addition to changing her pledge. I consider these to be tacit admissions of disclosure deficiencies. I'll let you scrutinize all that with an eye for polemics. I can't afford to antagonize her too much, because now that I have studied her operation in greater detail, I fully expect Amber to be an even bigger media powerhouse. She has considerable momentum, old media is asleep at the switch. I look forward to being invited on her show in due course.
