FINRA Arbitration Analysis
* How We Define an Investor Case
Investor cases are FINRA arbitration awards where the Nature of the Dispute is classified as Customer vs. Member — meaning a retail investor filed a claim against a broker-dealer or associated person. Cases where the claimant is a corporate entity (LLC, Corp, Trust, Fund, etc.) are excluded to focus on individual retail investors.
A case is counted as a win when the compensatory damages awarded to the claimant are $1,000 or more. The win/loss ratio counts only decided cases — claimant wins vs. respondent wins. Dismissed cases, expungement proceedings, and procedural dismissals are excluded from the win/loss ratio as they do not represent a merits decision.
Pro Se cases are those where the claimant appeared without an attorney, as identified in the Representation of Parties section of the award document.
** Average award figures use a trimmed mean — the top 10% and bottom 10% of winning awards are excluded before averaging, to reduce the influence of outliers on both ends.
All statistics are derived from automated text extraction of FINRA arbitration award PDFs. No consistent formatting standard exists across these documents — outcomes, dollar amounts, and case classifications are identified through pattern matching against raw text. Results may be incomplete or miscategorized where award language is non-standard, ambiguous, or where OCR quality is poor (common in pre-2013 scanned documents). Treat all figures as directionally informative, not authoritative.