June 30, 2009
Here we go. The pendulum swings to the other extreme. You want to safeguard investors which is laudable. The cost of these audits and enforcement should not fall on the industry. This should be a budget item. Just have the Treasury/Fed "bailout" the investors by providing some of the TARP money for this. You already have efforts out there trying to keep us from making a living. 12b-1 fees have been attacked, advisory fees, C share mutual fund fees. I guess the feeling out there is that the majority of people can do this themselves. I assure you in my 26 years in the business that only a small percentage of the population has the knowledge and the interest to self-manage their portfolio. You want to catch fraud—great idea. You will see that this will force even more good people to leave the investment industry and keep others from coming into it. Making this a burden on the industry will, in the long run, hurt the investing public because they will be forced to be do-it-yourselfers. We’ve seen what the public does when they don’t have advisors. They are disastrous.
Thomas R. Foster, CFP®