Benefits of financial advice by The Washington Post Article
Mind Your Money, and Your Broker
Your mutual fund broker is there to help you save for retirement or
your daughter's education by helping you select investments that
match your tolerance for risk and your time frame for saving.
Your mutual fund broker is also there to save for his own retirement
and his daughter's education by selling you investments that pay him
and his firm commissions and other fees.
Investors who don't keep both facts in mind may find themselves
getting a lot less than they should from their financial choices,
according to regulators, academics and consumer advocates.
Over the past two years, the brokerage industry's main regulators,
the Securities and Exchange Commission and NASD, have uncovered and
punished unsavory practices, including failing to give investors
their promised commission discounts and accepting secret payments to
push particular mutual funds. The exact details varied, but all of
the cases had a common thread -- brokers who engineered transactions
to earn themselves a benefit rather than primarily thinking of their
customers.
"You should always be suspicious of your broker, just like you
should be suspicious of your lawyer or other professionals you deal
with. Is their advice 100 percent in my benefit?" said Walt
Woerheide, vice president of the American College in Pennsylvania,
which specializes in training financial industry professionals.
More than 91 million Americans -- and almost half the nation's
households -- own mutual funds, and the vast majority of them don't
buy their shares directly from the fund company. Many invest through
a retirement plan that limits their choices and negotiates
discounted fees and commissions. But almost one-third of fund
customers rely on advice from someone who works for a broker-dealer,
according to the Investment Company Institute, a mutual fund trade
group.
Many of the fund buyers who turn to brokers are new to the financial
markets and less sophisticated about money matters. They really do
need help sorting through the nation's 8,100 mutual funds.
"Like any other important decision, investors can benefit from
advice. . . . You can do it yourself, but you probably won't do as
good a job," said Bruce Fenton, president of Atlantic Financial
Inc., a Massachusetts brokerage firm. He likened a good broker to a
good doctor. "You can go online, choose a drug you want and get a
service that can give you Canadian drugs, but you aren't getting the
best health care."
But regulators and consumer advocates say that the customers who use
brokers often don't really understand their relationship. Although
many brokers call themselves investment counselors or financial
advisers, and some sit in the lobby of a bank or even a retirement
center, they are fundamentally salesmen who make their money from
commissions, just like car salesmen.
"Despite their ads, brokers are not advisers, they are salespeople.
. . . They have no legal obligation to recommend products that are
in your best interest. Their obligation is to recommend products
that are financially suitable, and that's a much lower standard,"
said Barbara Roper, director of investor protection for the Consumer
Federation of America. "The broker is going to get paid, and that
payment is going to come out of your pocket."
Mutual fund brokers officially get paid in a variety of ways,
depending on which class of shares an investor buys. On Class A
shares, investors pay an upfront charge of about 5 percent, called a
load, most of which goes to the broker who sold the fund to them.
The commission for B shares is collected at the back end, when the
investor withdraws money from the fund, and C shares pay the broker
by charging higher annual fees than the other classes.
Bentley College finance professor Leonard Rosenthal warned that
unwary investors sometimes confuse broker-sold B and C shares with
"no-load" funds that are bought directly from the fund company and
charge no commission at all.
Remember, he warned, "every time you buy or sell, [brokers] earn a
commission."
Investors also need to keep a close watch on the annual fees charged
by the funds their broker recommends, said Edward S. O'Neal, a
professor of finance at Wake Forest University. He said that many of
the mutual fund companies that pay high commissions to brokers
specialize in actively managed funds -- in which a fund manager
continually makes investment decisions, buying and selling --
instead of low-cost funds that simply replicate market indexes by
holding the same stocks.
The differences are not trivial: Actively managed funds can charge 2
percent or more a year, while the Vanguard Group's famously cheap
fund that mimics the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index charges 0.18
percent.
"All mutual funds have costs that lower your investment returns, and
even small differences today can have a dramatic effect over time.
Before you invest, be sure to ask your broker or the fund about the
fees you'll have to pay . . . as well as ongoing expenses that come
out of the fund's assets," said Geraldine Walsh, of the SEC's
investor education office. "It's your money, so don't be shy about
getting the facts you need to make an informed investment decision."
Still, Taeya Lauer, a Seattle broker with D.A. Davidson & Co., notes
that the SEC and NASD require funds and brokers to show potential
investors their net returns after all fees.
Investors also need to be aware of the various abuses that the SEC
and NASD have recently uncovered. Among them:
A regulatory examination found that brokerage firms failed to give
promised discounted commissions -- in Street shorthand, breakpoints
-- to 20 percent of investors who put $25,000 or more into Class A
shares. That was 288,300 accounts, with an average overcharge of
$243. The entire industry is refunding $64.3 million to customers.
Some brokers improperly steered customers into Class B shares, which
have the back-end load, and failed to point out that they would
qualify for breakpoints if they invested another way. In one 2002
case, NASD found that a broker sold $2.1 million in Class B shares
-- netting himself a huge commission -- to an investor who would
have paid no commission at all if he had bought A shares in the same
fund.
Brokers switched clients from one fund to another similar product to
generate new commissions for themselves. This has been a
particularly large problem in the arena of variable annuities, which
are life insurance products that include mutual fund investments.
Firms were accepting side payments from particular fund companies
but failed to tell clients. Last fall, Morgan Stanley paid $50
million to settle SEC and NASD allegations that it failed to tell
customers it was getting extra money from 12 fund companies to
promote their products. Some of the payments were in cash, while
others were in the form of "directed brokerage," in which the fund
companies sent Morgan Stanley their stock- and bond-buying business
in exchange for favored treatment by the firm's retail brokers.
Some critics say the current setup is untenable and should be
changed. "IBM doesn't pay brokers to push IBM stock, but the whole
mutual fund industry is premised on the idea of paying brokers to
push mutual funds. You need to divorce the product from the
salesperson. There's too much abuse," said University of Mississippi
law professor Mercer E. Bullard, who runs a shareholder advocacy
group.
But the industry defends the commission-based system, saying that
some investors need help choosing investments and that commissions
are a fair way of compensating brokers for their time and effort.
"You're getting advice, and there is value to advice. But it has to
be paid for," said James D. Spellman, spokesman for the Securities
Industry Association.
But perhaps not if that advice isn't completely unbiased, consumer
advocate Roper cautions: "Brokers aren't necessarily looking to
recommend the best possible funds for you. They're looking for the
ones that are appropriate for you among the group that pays them
highly."
Regulators for their part are opting for smaller fixes, focused
mostly on disclosure. Brokers now have to do a better job of telling
customers they may be eligible for breakpoints and must keep better
records to ensure that the discounts actually materialize.
The SEC has also proposed banning directed brokerage and requiring
brokers to tell their customers -- at the point of sale -- exactly
how much the brokers and their firm receive for selling the products
they are recommending. The SIA is lobbying hard against the
point-of-sale proposal, saying it would be prohibitively expensive
to provide individualized statements to each investor.
But mutual fund trade group ICI has come out in favor of it.
"Disclosure at the point of sale is a very powerful tool to bring to
an investor's attention those relationships that could influence a
broker's recommendations," said the group's president, Paul Schott
Stevens.
The SEC and NASD continue to look for new abusive practices but, in
the end, regulators and academics said, customers must still look
out for themselves.
"Examiners are focusing on the sales of mutual funds to investors,
given their popularity, and we're looking for sales that may be
unsuitable or inappropriate for the investor," said Lori A.
Richards, who heads the SEC's compliance and inspection division.
"But it's important that investors be educated about what they are
buying."
2004 The Washington Post Company
By Brooke A. Masters and Lauren Bayne Anderson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 4, 2004; Page F01
Copyright 2004 The Washington Post
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