I have some really good picked out and plan on investing thru Ameritrade. My question is how safe is ? Will I log-on one day and find all my 50k mysteriously gone?

 

  • A nobody 11:02 am on February 11, 2010

    I’ve been in the business 40+ years and have not seen it happen.
    All major firms are required to have built in safe guards, which have to be audit at least once a year by an outside firm, this is in addition to the daily audits done by the firm themselves. All this is in addition to the internal bookkeeping audits the firm must do on a continuing bases.

    At least within evey 18 months, regulators inspect all record keeping and system policies & proceedures.

    The securities industry is one of the most highly regulated, business in the country.

    I have found that there wasn’t a customer account or an institutional account worth loosing your reputation over or causing doubt in any of the customers

    As I had all my people tell customers who had expressed doubts about my firm’s intregity, "If you don’t trust the people you do business with,. don’t do business with them"

  • brian-the-brain 11:02 am on February 11, 2010

    I doubt you have anything to worry about. Use a strong password. I have been trading in 6 different accounts online with 3 different companies for 10 years total and never had a problem. (All those oddball IRAs, what a pain).

    So the scam goes like this if you are targeted. Its called pump and dump. They buy stocks in a small illiquid company. They log in to as many peoples accounts as they can and start buying those stocks to drive up the price. the action brings in other interest scanning for this and it takes off. They then dump their shares for profit.

    The thing is you report it and get your account put back together. They have a responsibilty to protect you if they want to keep customers and in this news story you will notice it is a loss for them not for you. If they left you out to dry you would go to the papers and they would have a run on their accounts.

    There is no way they will let you lose money in this fashion. It is safe enough. If you really are concerned because of large amounts of money, open up multiple accounts so if it happens to one somewhere it was only 20% of your money at risk.

    Good luck investing.

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