Mazi Bahadori is chief operating officer and chief compliance officer of Altruist. He came from compliance work at Aspiration in Marina del Rey, California, and a few months as chief compliance officer at Swell Investing in Santa Monica, California, after earlier registrations at Morgan Stanley and at PIMCO. He is known for a Financial Planning column on payment for order flow.
Congress, law school, and Goldman Sachs
A biography SIFMA publishes says he began as a staff member for a member of the U.S. Congress and as an aide in the White House Counsel's Office. It gives him a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, a J.D. from the Chapman University School of Law, and an M.B.A. from the Argyros School of Business and Economics. The same note places him on the government affairs team at Goldman Sachs and in legal and compliance at PIMCO.
Dates on the Form U4
FINRA BrokerCheck, using the Form U4 he filed, shows a registration at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Laguna Niguel, California, from February 2010 to March 2011. Financial Planning's author note calls that job a financial adviser role. The report then shows PIMCO Investments LLC in Newport Beach, California, from April 2011 to April 2016.
The employment history on the filing lists him as chief compliance officer of Aspiration Partners Inc. from September 2016 to June 2018, and as chief executive, chief compliance officer, and anti-money-laundering compliance officer of Aspiration Financial LLC from December 2017 to June 2018, both in Marina del Rey. From June to December 2018 he was chief compliance officer of Swell Investing, LLC, in Santa Monica. From December 2018 the form lists him as chief operating officer of Altruist Corp. and as chief executive of Altruist Financial LLC and of Altruist LLC, in Culver City, California. Another entry says he has been chief executive and chief compliance officer of Altruist LLC since December 1, 2018. He has been registered with Altruist Financial LLC since September 19, 2019.
What investors are trying to get
"Markets are a means, not an end," he wrote in Financial Planning on September 20, 2021. The column argues that a fight limited to payment for order flow misses larger gaps in who gets advice, and it discloses that Altruist collects a small portion of its income from that practice.