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Report: #311502

Complaint Review: Fisher Investments - Woodside California

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  • Reported By: Bennett Colorado
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  • Fisher Investments 13100 Skyline Blvd. Woodside, California U.S.A.

Fisher Investments Frivolous arbitration filing Woodside California

*Consumer Comment: The fee is justified

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Fisher Investments contracts specify an early termination fee of $1,000. This can serve as a deterrent to leaving Fisher Investments. These contracts also have a clause: Any and all Advisory Fees paid to FISHER will be returned to the Client if this agreement is terminated during the first (30) days.

On July 19th, 2007, Pamela Nevil, a sales person at the Denver office after verifying with Fisher Investments headquarters, told me that Fisher Investments does not levy this fee and it is only written into the contract to deter people from abusing Fisher Investments. I wrote her statement down and included it in an email with a follow up question. Pamela emailed back the following day that she would call back soon. When she did, she confirmed that the early termination fee is considered to be an advisory fee for the purposes of the above clause.

On December 11th, 2007, I opened two discretionary accounts with Fisher Investments. These two accounts were to be managed as one. On January 7th, 2008 unsatisfied with the Fisher Investments wholesale approach to money management, I canceled my agreement with them and wrote a blog on the newspapers website detailing f Fisher Investments shortcomings.

Soon afterwards Fisher Investments attempted to collect $1,000 from each of my two accounts. They were unable to collect the money directly from the custodian, because I moved my accounts to another custodian immediately after canceling with Fisher Investments. They persisted by sending me two bills, which I promptly sent back to them with short notes.

On Friday evening, February 15th, 2008 Fisher Investments legal counsel Fred Harring posted a threat to take legal action against me if I did not remove the blog and issue a retraction. It is still posted here: http://www.odessapage.com/new/ru/fisher-investments#comment-315

Several hours later I temporarily removed the original blog, while we review our options. The original blog is also being reworked into a newspaper article slated for publication in the March issue of the newspaper.

On February 22nd, 2008 in an apparent attempt to intimidate me, an outside counsel for Fisher Investments filed a bogus arbitration case with JAMS claiming "breech of contract" for not paying the termination fees. Other ridiculous and baseless accusations were additionally levied in this document, including Tortuous Interference with Prospective Business Relations, Defamation, Trademark Infringement, Trademark Dilution, Injury to Business Reputation, Unfair Competition and Unjust Enrichment - none of these have any basis in fact.

I have already found others who have been harassed in a similar way by Fisher Investments for saying what they think about the company. This "money manager" seems to stop at nothing in their attempts to shut up anyone who doesn't like them.

Jake
Bennett, Colorado
U.S.A.

This report was posted on Ripoff Report on 02/23/2008 11:28 PM and is a permanent record located here: https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/fisher-investments/woodside-california-94062/fisher-investments-frivolous-arbitration-filing-woodside-california-311502. The posting time indicated is Arizona local time. Arizona does not observe daylight savings so the post time may be Mountain or Pacific depending on the time of year. Ripoff Report has an exclusive license to this report. It may not be copied without the written permission of Ripoff Report. READ: Foreign websites steal our content

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REBUTTALS & REPLIES:
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1Consumer
0Employee/Owner

#1 Consumer Comment

The fee is justified

AUTHOR: Texaslib - (USA)

POSTED: Saturday, October 03, 2009

I am a satisfied client of Fisher Investments.  I would like to make a couple of points about the original report.

1.  I cannot comment the verbal comments the author of the original report says he received regarding whether the fee specified in the contract would actually be collected or not.  However, any time I sign a contract which clearly states that I owe a fee I expect I will be required to pay it regardless of any verbal conversations I have with a sales person.

2.  The fee is justified.  At least in my case, Fisher did a considerable amount of work looking at my portfolio I was thinking of moving to them and creating a proposal of how they would invest and manage my assets.  They prepared a report which included specifics of how I would be invested across several dimensions (stocks vs. bonds, US vs. World Markets, and industry sectors).  They prepared  a report which included simulations of how their two alternative recommendations may perform under pessimistic, optimistic, and "average" market conditions over a long period of time.    You can do this type of simulation yourself for free at some web sites (Fidelity for example), but it takes an awful lot of work to set it up and you have to know how you plan to spread your portfolio across asset and risk categories.  If you already know that much about investing, why would you want to  bother with a portfolio manager in the first place.

3.  I don't understand the behavior of the person making the original report. What does he mean that he is unsatisfied with their "wholesale approach to money management".  What is a "wholesale approach" in the first place?  I would not choose those words at all to describe how Fisher manages money.  Anyway, he opened an account on 12/11/2007 and closed it on 1/7/2008.  That is less than a month.  It took that much time for Fisher to set up a new account for me at my custodian (Fidelity) get my assets transferred into it from an existing account under management by Fidelity Professional Asset management, and to reposition me from the funds Fidelity had me in to the stocks, bond funds, and international ETF's Fisher recommended.   My point here is that the author of the report could not possibly have learned anything new about Fisher's money management approach in the time he allowed that he did not already learn during the sales and analysis cycle.


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