Is Your Broker Charging You A Fair Commission?

Is your broker charging you a fair commission? Not surprisingly, many investors do not fully understand how much they are paying in fees and commissions to their broker-dealer, and disparities from firm to firm can be wide and difficult to decipher. A recent study conducted by the North American Securities Administrators Association (“NASAA”), an association of state securities regulators, highlighted this issue, finding that investors would benefit from a “greater consistency and transparency in the disclosure of fees.”

The focus of the study was to examine the fee disclosures at thirty four (34) different broker dealers to compare methods of disclosure between firms and determine whether the customers were being adequately informed of the fee structure within their accounts.
As a result of the study, NASAA recommended that model fee disclosures be adopted to ensure that investors are accurately advised. The goal for model fee disclosures is to create something that will be simple and straight-forward, making it easier for customers to understand.

The problem now is that there is a great disparity in the way fees are disclosed to customers. Fee disclosures can range in size from one paragraph to up to seven pages, and such disclosures can be in a document between one and forty-five pages long, making them hard to find. Fee disclosures are also oftentimes buried in fine print where investors are unlikely to read.

The fear is that this wide discrepancy between how firms disclose their fees to investors can be misleading, whether done intentionally or unintentionally. In the past four years alone, seven firms (including Woodstock Financial Group, JHS Capital Advisors f/k/a Pointe Capital, Salomon Whitney, Newbridge Securities, John Thomas Financial, A&F Financial Securities, and First Midwest Securities) have been sanctioned for issues regarding charges to customers. For reasons such as that, investors need to be wary of what they are paying and why.

Churning is currently a problem for investors who have their trust abused by their broker. Churning refers to when a broker makes excessive trades in an account to earn more commissions. If an investor is paying commissions per trade, it is in the broker’s financial interest to trade as much as possible in the account, since more trades means more commissions. For the broker, more commissions mean a bigger pay check.
For the customer, more trades can mean more risk, since in theory many, if not all, of the profits earned by the account will be eaten up by the higher commissions. Often churning results in significant losses in the account due in whole or in part to these high commissions.

Brokers who are churning a customer account also frequently charge higher commissions than they would or should otherwise charge per trade. Both of these practices are against the law and a violation of securities industry rules.
When a customer account is being traded frequently, a broker is supposed to recommend to the customer to put that account on what is called a fixed management fee (often 1-2% of the total account assets). This will keep the fees paid by the customer to a minimum. However, brokers who are looking out for their own interests will not do that, causing the customer to pay exorbitant fees. Churning victims can wind up paying their broker and broker-dealer hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in commissions and miscellaneous fees.

Any investor who believes that they or a family member have lost money as a result of churning may be able to recover some or all of their losses. The attorneys at Malecki Law are experienced in representing investors in churning cases. For a free consultation, contact us.

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