Professional Experience

Connor Houlihan’s public FINRA BrokerCheck record lists registrations at five broker-dealers between 2011 and 2024, all of them in securities and fund distribution. The common thread is translating investment products and business strategy into decisions that people can understand. Everything below can be checked against his FINRA BrokerCheck record, CRD 5881228.

Registration history

These are the broker-dealer registrations FINRA shows for Connor Houlihan, newest first. What each firm does is public knowledge; the day-to-day of the work is described in the essays linked from this page.

• Alto Securities, LLC, March to April 2024. The final registration on the record.
• Foreside Fund Services, LLC, October 2020 to February 2024. Foreside is a third-party fund distributor and principal underwriter that provides distribution and compliance services to many fund sponsors rather than one. Working inside a distributor of that kind means seeing how a wide range of products, from mutual funds and ETFs to interval funds, are brought to advisers and platforms.
• Sentinus-Halo Securities, LLC, June to August 2020. A short registration in the middle of 2020.
• DWS Distributors, Inc., May 2015 to March 2020. The Chicago-based U.S. distribution arm of Deutsche Bank’s asset-management business, known today as DWS. Nearly five years on the asset-manager side, where a fund’s objectives, risks, fees, and role in a portfolio are explained to the advisers and institutions who evaluate it.
• Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, March 2011 to January 2015. Nearly four years at one of the largest brokerages in the country, and the start of the registered career. Why I Left Fidelity describes what that period taught and why the next step followed.

Licenses and exams

• Series 7, General Securities Representative, passed March 2011
• Series 63, Uniform Securities Agent State Law, passed April 2011
• Series 65, Uniform Investment Adviser Law, passed January 2014
• SIE, Securities Industry Essentials, credited October 2018 when FINRA introduced the exam

Experience themes

Fund distribution

Understanding how funds reach advisers, institutions, and investors, including channels, positioning, share classes, fees, and product communication. The mechanics are laid out in Fund Distribution Explained and Mutual Fund Share Classes and Fees.

Valuation and strategy

Corporate valuation, financial modeling, portfolio strategy, risk mitigation, and the analysis required to evaluate a transaction or financial product. Due Diligence in Plain English and How to Read Form ADV show the method applied to public documents.

Explaining things plainly

Distribution is not simply sales. It is the bridge between a strategy, the people who build it, the advisers who evaluate it, and the investors who live with the results, and most of the work is translation. Finance and Creativity is about that habit.

A note on dates and titles

Employment dates, current affiliations, and role descriptions should always be read in their original context. The registration dates above come from FINRA and show when Connor was registered with each broker-dealer, which is not always identical to employment dates. He is not currently registered with any broker-dealer, and this site is not offered on behalf of any firm. For a plain-English walk-through of the record itself, see the Securities Background page; for anything else, the Contact page.