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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (95935)	5/12/2002 12:48:16 PM
From: Tommaso	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Yes, my experience with bank trust fund officers was that you could at least get them to do things a little differently--not because they thought you were right, but because they thought it advisable to humor their customers. I think I already posted this some time back, but after the 1987 crash I got a reassuring letter from a Suntrust manager who said that there had been a worse crash during World War I. What he didn't know was that while the markets were closed for several months, the Dow Jones Index was put on a new basis, and that when the markets finally reopened, stocks were higher than they had been but the new index had a lower numerical value. I wrote pointing this out and never got an answer, of course. I did get an answer when I wrote pointing out a fairly bad error in their reporting the performance of one of their bond funds. Nobody else inside or outside the bank had caught it. However, they did finally accede to the idea (about 1972) that my father's holding 25% of his total net worth in Polaroid was not good. And in fact they did make some useful, though minor, changes in the portfolio prior to the '87 crash. But they always follow the "prudent man rule." When "prudent men" are getting killed, you get killed, too.