I own a claims consulting firm which assists large stock investors file class action claims and while I am not an attorney, I am intimately familiar with the Nasdaq Market Makers case. I will try to answer some of the questions that I have seen posted on this board in the last few days.
First of all, if you received a pre-printed form with your transactions already listed then it is a simple matter to sign and send in your form. This was sent to people with less than 105 transactions. It may or may not be accurate but I wouldn't worry if it is missing a few trades since each missing trade may only translate into a few dollars, if that. You do not need to attach documentation of your transactions with a pre-printed claim form. If you received a basic proof of claim form without the transactions listed then you probably had more than 105 transactions or the market maker which was involved with your trades may not have supplied your trading records to the claims administrator. In any event, you will need to track down all of your trades from 1989 to 1996, determine if they are in eligible stocks, then see if they were in the eligible time period (each stock has a slightly different period during the 7 year claims period)and then list the qualifying trades on your form. You also have to attach documentation of all of your trades. Since you are only allowed to claim up to 70 transactions on the basic proof of claim and since you will probably not recover more than $100, it may not be worth the effort. If you had more than 70 trades, you are required to file an electronic proof of claim form. This is a very complicated process which makes sense if you had thousands of trades during the period.
By the way, at this time, it is impossible to estimate how much you will receive per share traded, since there are several large variables. The biggest unknown is how many institutions will file claims. Since there is a finite pot of money which has to be allocated between all of the claim filers, institutional filing will have a large impact on what individuals receive. You might also want to think twice about hiring an accountant to prepare and file the claim for $100 or $200. While that fee is very, very reasonable for the work involved, you may not recover that amount of money.
I know this all sounds fairly negative for the small investor but from my experience, this was actually a pretty good settlement by the class action attornies involved with this case.
Brad Heffler |
