Letter to the editor: Financial management companies have got it made

Talk about it

Surprising the media hasn’t connected the dots between what financial management companies pay in commissions and bonuses and what they earn for their investors.

If you were going to hire a contractor to remodel your house and he showed up in a limousine, wearing a suit, gold watch and $1,000 pair of shoes and after having just flown in from the Bahamas in his private jet, do you think his prices will be fair?

When we buy a car we shop price and value. When we place our IRAs and 401Ks in the hands of these financial management firms we sit and let them pay themselves outrageously high salaries and bonuses while we take the losses on the investments they managed for us. This doesn’t make sense does it?

I’m looking at my investments that were managed by these big financial investment concerns and I’m aghast at the number of trades made on my behalf that were losses in 2009. On the other hand, the companies doing the trading made so much money they could afford to pay out-of-this-world bonuses while trading my investments for a loss. On top of that they begged the government to underwrite their little pirate franchise because they still couldn’t steal enough for themselves.

Would you invest your 401K with a homeless person or someone who was bankrupt? Have you ever seen a bank operating out of a tent so it could pay its investors higher interests? Apparently we do.

I don’t need the government to run this “pirate ship” of financial investment firms. I am pulling my investments away from these pirates. When they lose enough clients I suspect they will trim their sails, shape up their ship and share their booty fairly with the people that supplied them the money in the first place.

David Wolfer

Bismarck

Tags: opinion, letters, finance