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Dear Mr. Berko:

Dear D.H.:

It’s difficult for a lady to go it alone in a milieu filled with sharks who must remain in constant motion to stay alive. Many women have been conditioned by a male-dominant society to defer to men, and single women like you are easy prey.

There are 101 ways to skin a goat, and Edward Jones, Primerica and Dean Witter know every one of them. No matter your account size, it’s difficult to trust a Wall Street firm. Most of Wall Street is a harpy, a cormorant crooked as a corkscrew and with no shame. Read on.

The Bank of Boston is being sued by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), which claims that the bank “executed tens of thousands of trades in which prices were manipulated,” costing employees hundreds of millions of dollars.

In 2008, Merrill Lynch lost more than $30 billion finagling in the mortgage-backed securities market but paid its key employees billions of dollars in “atta boy” bonuses with U.S. Treasury bailout money.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fined JPMorgan Chase more than $700 million last October, alleging hank-panky in underwriting and managing Alabama municipal bond underwritings.

The SEC is investigating Credit Suisse, JPMorgan and Bear Stearns regarding a scheme that sold billions of dollars of risky non-liquid securities to the public funds of hundreds of Florida cities, counties and school districts in 2007 and 2008.

The SEC believes that Ropes and Gray, a prestigious international law firm, and Moody’s Investors Services are guilty of providing inside information to favored hedge funds involving hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal trades. Bank of America and UBS are being investigated by the SEC for allegedly rigging auctions to select investment advisers and paying kickbacks to secure money management business.

Since 1993, the SEC had received numerous credible complaints about Bernard Madoff, including six very detailed and substantive tips. But Arthur Levitt, the SEC’s “do-nothing” chairman, sat around with his finger up his nose. Levitt admitted that the SEC messed up when it came to investigating the Madoff scheme.

Acknowledging conflicts of interest, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s provided AAA ratings to almost $2.5 trillion in mortgage bonds that were bought by investors’ pension plans and mutual funds — and are now nearly worthless.

And those are just a few dirty snowflakes in an ugly snowstorm.

Your complaints are common. But you’re a small fry, a woman and not important enough to attract attention. Even if you lost money, you’d probably be reluctant to take on the expense and hire a lawyer. You don’t stand a decent chance to have wrongs redressed, because the brokerage’s complaint process is stacked against you. That’s why brokerages won’t let you take your complaints to a state or federal court, where your chance of prevailing against a wrong is significantly better.

Your broker is probably honest, but his firm places unrelenting pressure on him to generate increasing commission dollars. If he doesn’t, he is placed in a penalty box. Because those penalties can be severe, your broker is encouraged to sell things that are against his better judgment.

The best way to avoid this problem is to assiduously review your statement each month. If you find an irregularity, call the broker immediately, then send a follow-up letter by registered mail that day to his manager. That letter publicly puts the broker and his firm on record. The brokerage firm’s manager will do almost anything to avoid a complaint letter. You can’t stop those things from happening, but they can be corrected right away.

Another way to prevent this from happening is to have your account managed (for a fee) by a registered investment adviser. These professionals are held to a much higher standard than stockbrokers. And since they earn annual advisory fees (no commissions), they have no incentive to fiddle with your account.

Please address your financial questions to Malcolm Berko, P.O. Box 8303, Largo, Fla. 33775 or e-mail him at mjberko@yahoo.com. © 2009 Creators.Com