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To: Amy J who wrote (133389)	4/26/2001 8:00:37 AM
From: GVTucker	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Amy, RE: I wouldn't immediately assume a broker is always innocent. No, you're right. The broker isn't always innocent. In fact, I could take that one step further and say that most often, the broker is culpable. In your example, the broker might deserve the lion's share of the blame. Wall St. is a pretty slimy place, and I escaped it as soon as I could. My experience with people last year, though, leads me to believe that greed blinded almost everyone. I give advice to many people, and last year my advice was pretty simple--exercise your options, sell the stock, pay the tax and pocket the rest. Most all of these people chose instead to listen to the siren's song coming from the broker, and instead exercised and margined. You know how the horror story goes from there. Others were dealing with unethical brokers, but they would overlook seemingly innocent transgressions because, hey, the guy's making money. That didn't last long. In the end, if a person is going to take the responsibility of investing their own portfolio, they are obligated to learn the system. There are a lot of people--not just brokers--that are going to try to steal that money, and if they aren't educated, then they could easily get taken. If you don't want to go through the effort to learn, you're probably going to be better off finding someone else to handle the money.