Three stories the SEC would rather you never heard about...
- Nicolas Morgan
- Jul 14
- 4 min read
Three SEC stories.
One question the agency can't answer.
July 14th, 2026
Dear ICAN Partners,
The SEC exists to protect investors. This protection should be the bedrock of our free and fair markets. That's the premise behind every rule the SEC writes and every case it brings.
But a very different picture begins to emerge when you look closely at the actions of the regulatory agency and ask a simple question: Who does this protect?
A series of recent Unchained Markets Substack posts do just that.
At the SEC, Actions Speak Louder Than Words
Chairman Atkins himself has spoken inspiringly of refocusing the SEC on its founding mission of defending investors and the need to stop rewarding staff for bringing cases and discouraging them from ever declining one. Meanwhile, the actions of SEC staff in the case of Jamie Quick couldn’t be further from that mission or Chairman Atkins’ guidance.
During more than three years of litigation, the SEC never accused Jamie of fraud, never accused her of breaking any law. In fact, it admits she did nothing wrong. And yet its staff pursued her anyway, moving to take her money and then trying to charge her interest for the time she spent defending herself.
ICAN got that attempt thrown out in two business days, alongside co-counsel Jacob Frenkel of Dickinson Wright. But it took the SEC five well-paid professionals and roughly fifty pages of filings to come after a few thousand dollars from a blameless woman - for whom those dollars were far from insignificant. No one in that chain of action had to be cruel to produce a cruel result—each was just doing their job, and Jamie was just a name instead of a real person. That's why new leadership at the top doesn't fix this. No single person authored the harm, so no single person can undo it.
In a conversation with Jamie and co-counsel Jacob Frenkel, ICAN a range of subjects, from the personal to the structural: what this did to Jamie's life and her view of the capital markets (short version—she won't go near them again, and the reason isn't the one you'd guess), and what it actually takes to change how the SEC operates. Jacob, like many folks on the ICAN team, is a former SEC enforcement attorney, so he knows from the inside how a case like this gets made—and why litigation, not new leadership, is required to shift the culture that produced it.
The Harm of the Accredited Investor Rule No One Is Talking About
You've heard the simple argument against the accredited investor rule: ordinary people locked out of the next hot startup. It’s a valid concern, but it’s not the whole story. And it threatens to overshadow the less flashy, but perhaps more far-reaching implications of locking millions of Americans out of private markets.
The case of ICAN client Emily Kapszukiewicz showcases not only the absurdity of the accredited investor rule, but also how the rule has begun to distort the health of crucial American industries by too often preventing the people closest to a field from funding the work in it.
A knowledgeable, experienced healthcare professional, Emily is exactly the kind of investor Laurence Girard had in mind when he founded Healthcare Shares, a public benefit corporation built around a simple idea: American healthcare gets better when the people closest to patients have a seat at the ownership table. But when Emily tried to invest in Healthcare Shares, she was blocked from doing so because her personal wealth fell just below the government’s arbitrary threshold.
In the name of “protecting” investors, the SEC is preventing millions of Americans like Emily from investing in the industries they know best and ensuring that the capital to fund crucial industries, like healthcare, is instead increasingly coming from institutional investors whose primary lens is financial returns. And they are robbing those industries of the opportunity to benefit from investors who have the knowledge and experience to recognize what returns-focused capital can't.
There's nothing wrong with returns-focused capital. But when returns are the only lens being used, decision-making reflects it: the investments that pencil out get made, and the ones that only matter in a smaller market or that won’t pay off until later, often don't. In healthcare, that means practices open where the math works rather than where they're needed, and research clusters around the conditions with the largest markets.
This is just one more example of what we’re all losing to the arbitrary wealth and income requirements of the accredited investor rule - a story that has gone untold until now.
He arrived believing the casebook. A year on a real docket changed his mind.
The textbook version of the SEC is clean: an agency that protects investors from the people who would harm them. Our law clerk, Tristyn, arrived believing it—the way most law students do.
Then he spent a year on real cases, watching how the agency actually behaves toward the people on the other side of it. The gap between the two—the SEC on the page and the SEC in practice—is the whole story. We’re sharing what he learned, what he thinks everyone should know.
These stories deserve our attention
We created Unchained Markets, ICAN's Substack, to help give voice to the people impacted by SEC actions, to share the stories too often not being told.
It's free. And every subscriber makes the next quiet overreach by the SEC a little harder to keep quiet.
With gratitude,
Nick Morgan
Founder and President of ICAN
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