INVESTOR RESPONSIBILTIES
Your Responsibilities As An Investor
To help ensure the success of your investments, you will want to take a number of important steps personally.
Inform And Educate Yourself
- Read thoroughly all sales literature, prospectuses, and/or other offering documents, when available, before making any investment.
- Consider carefully all investment risks, fees, and/or other factors explained in these documents.
- Make certain that you understand the relationship not only between your investment objectives and the risks and returns on your particular investments but also between your particular investments and your investment objectives. You need to remember at all times that every investment has some degree of risk and that it is possible to lose money - some or all - on any investment.
Communicate With Your Financial Representative
- Provide completely accurate information about your financial status, investment goals, and risk tolerance when seeking investment advice, so that your investment firm can provide you with appropriate recommendations.
- Seek out whatever information you need or want from your financial representative by proactively asking any questions you have about your account, a specific transaction, risk exposures, potential conflicts of interest, and, of course, commissions, sales charges, and other fees.
- Notify your financial representative promptly whenever there is a significant change in your investment objectives, risk tolerance, income, net worth, or liquidity needs.
- Review your portfolio holdings on a regular basis, and whenever your financial circumstances change. You may want to make appropriate changes based on your investments' performance and your current objectives.
- If you have any holdings in mutual funds, to tell your financial representative about similar mutual-fund holdings you have at other broker-dealers or directly with the mutual funds, so that your representative can make sure you receive any applicable "breakpoint" discount.
Keep Your Accounts Current
- Have cash or available margin-buying power in your investment account, or transfer funds into that account, to ensure payment for securities purchases by the settlement date. If you are paying by check or funds transfer, you should always make payments directly to your investment firm.
- Review all transaction confirmations and account statements or reports carefully and promptly. You should report any errors or any questions you have to your financial representative or branch manager immediately.
Use The Right Resources - Carefully
- Consult an attorney or a tax adviser for specific tax or legal advice.
- Keep in mind that you are fully responsible for your investment decisions, if you choose automated channels (Internet or telephone) for your trading needs.
- Consider carefully the validity and reliability of investment information obtained from all sources, especially unsolicited information obtained over the Internet.
- Understand that the opinions of securities analysts should never be interpreted as a guarantee of future performance or rate of return.
These best practices are aspirational in nature. To be sure, the diversity of firms may require each firm to accept, reject, or modify these practices to suit each firm's particular characteristics. To abide by the highest professional standards is an obligation we incurred when we chose to earn our living by managing other people's money. Anything less would be inconsistent with the trust our clients have placed in us and a betrayal of our professional obligation.
Adopted by the Board on November 4, 2004. For more information, contact John Maurello
