From: Dennis Joppe [Dennis@firstmutualinvestment.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 05, 2004 5:51 PM
To: rule-comments@sec.gov
Subject: in regards to rule s7-09-04

This is response to the proposed rule in Release No.IC-26356 which would 
prohibit the use of brokerage commissions, which includes 12b-1 fees. These 
fee’s have allowed us to give a great deal more service to our clients, such as 
quarterly, semi-annual or annual updates of their portfolio’s it has allowed us 
to move beyond the strickly transactional side of the business and more into the 
consulting side without a lot of additional fees for our clients. This allows us 
to offer ongoing analysis and rebalancing of the portfolios and gives us the 
latitude of offering basic financial planning and consulting. Without these fees 
we would be forced to eliminate the added services to our clients and would help 
promote the mediocre service the regulators would like would like to see 
disappear.It would cause us and a lot of other firms to downsize there staffs 
that the 12b1 fees help fund. Additional regulations requiring more disclosure 
of fee’s to the investor (so the investors understands the total costs) are 
applauded, but the elimination of a fee’s covering the hard work of ongoing 
services to the investing public is not. Dennis P. Joppe CFP,CFS Registered 
Representative, Registered Principal