Joe Nocera's New York Times Column Saturday reviled a real S.E.C. horror show. Seems like they like to go after the small fish and ignore the more obvious fraud and violations. The S.E.C. is an independent agency, so one must wonder if policies of going after the vulnerable and ignoring the guilty have changed.

The Boston office of the Securities and Exchange Commission began the investigation around 2001. Three years later, formal charges were brought against Mr. Kwak and seven others. By the time the case went to trial, in 2007, only three defendants were left; the others had settled with the S.E.C.

In that 2007 trial, Mr. Kwak and another defendant, Stephen J. Wilson, were cleared of one charge, with a hung jury on the remaining charges. (The third defendant, who foolishly acted as his own lawyer, was found liable and fined $10,000.)

The S.E.C. retried Mr. Wilson in 2008. He was cleared. Finally, in March 2009, the S.E.C. retried Mr. Kwak, with the same result. The jury took less than four hours to exonerate him.

Mr. Kwak’s life is now in tatters. He is around $1 million in debt and suffers from emotional problems. He has struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Although he is still a broker — he certainly can’t afford to retire — he long ago lost his job with Morgan Stanley, where he had spent several decades without so much as a hint of impropriety. Needless to say, his business is a small fraction of what it once was.

It seems the S.E.C. is measuring job performance statistics not on total value of a particular case, but on the number of cases.

But even the new S.E.C. enforcement chief, Robert Khuzami, acknowledges that the agency has for too long judged itself primarily on “quantitative metrics” — that is, the number of actions it brings and cases it settles — something he hopes to change. John A. Sten, a former S.E.C. lawyer who was Mr. Kwak’s lawyer during the second trial, said, “As an investigator, you are pressured to generate ‘stats.’ ” Clearly, it is far easier for the S.E.C. to add scalps by going after little guys, who will often agree to a settlement and a fine even when they are innocent. They either run out of money, or lose the will to keep fighting, or both.

So, the vulnerable get the pit bull attack, the large and complex....well, say you can Bernie Madoff?

The article does report the S.E.C. is going through a self assessment on management and operations due to being under new leadership.