February 22, 2004
Thank you for including me in your survey.
The proposed disclosure forms will be of great benefit to a novice such as myself when investing. It is imperative that at the very beginning of a meeting with a broker that the investor have this information. And there needs to be some way of making the broker accountable.
Too late smart, I agreed to let my broker at Wells Fargo place the majority of the funds in my IRA in an investment that would benefit himself and Wells Fargo. Later another broker informed me that Wells Fargo was encouraging/rewarding their brokers for promoting this fund, Wells Fargo High Tech Fund. I have since learned it was inappropriate to place such a great portion of the funds into such a high risk fund. But I didnt know enough to ask the right questions. And I lost over half of the money in my IRA.
And at my age, it is not likely I will recover those funds.
My greatest concern at this time is in trying to close out my IRA with Wells Fargo and transfer to another more ethical company. They ignored an order to sell the fund in question, and it took many calls on my part and the new brokers part to get any action. The one remaining fund is yet to be transferred because they wont cooperate in doing so, and wont return calls to even discuss the matter. How can SEC allow such outright unethical and probably illegal business operations from such a large corporation?
Who is in charge here?