Automated Investor Profiles
While doing my end of year RESP investments into one of my daughters’ accounts, and I decided to keep going with one of the mutual funds that seemed to be doing quite well in her portfolio. After doing a little research, saw the return was suitable and the MER was low, so on line I go to purchase said Mutual Fund.
I thought no more of it, as I had put in my purchase instructions and was given a transaction ID and I assumed that it was all going to just happen (I can hear you already, oh you poor naive boy).
Unknown to me was that my “Investor Profile” for this specific account was going to come and bite me in the tuchus. (yes when I get angry I jump to Yiddish as my language of choice, it works very well in these situations).
I received an e-mail overnight informing me that since this investment did not fit into my “Investor Profile” for this account, the transaction was not carried out, and here I sit one day later and no further ahead.
While I agree that there should be some checking going on for some investments, in this case I find this quite rude and annoying, for the following reasons:
- I must now phone someone to do the same transaction, and I really hate redoing something (especially when I didn’t do anything wrong).
- I am going to have to redo my “Investor Profile” questionnaire which will “only take 5 minutes” to answer all the inane questions.
- Another 45 minutes of my life will be wasted on a purchase that should have taken 5 minutes (not including the time I am spending ranting in this blog, but then again, I view this as therapy).
The Worst Part
I will most likely have to do the same for my other Children’s accounts as well.
I think InvestorLine or whatever portion of TD I am going to deal with (no it is not on the Investment side of things, it is in it’s Mutual Funds world, so it is even harder to deal with) should send the e-mail saying, “Are you sure?”, and if you are sure you can simply go back on line and click a button that says, “Yes I know this does not fit my Investment Profile, but I am a grown up and realize that it is my mistake to make”. Sounds like a good idea to me, but I am biased as well.
Seasons Greetings BCM,
As a tribute to Investor Profile I’ll use my alias BeenDer Donedat.
Believe it or not, it is mandated by the OSC and TD has to obide by it.
My Investor Profile has bit me in the ‘culo’ not once but twice; so much for honesty. Since then I rigged my answers to reflect the most aggressive profile. It did take not 5 but 10 minutes though.
Despite the pain of not making the MF purchase as desired on the given day, IP has saved me bit of money as the prices dropped further.
Cheers to all,
BeenDer Donedat
I must have answered these question properly the first time then. I meant on to set my funds in to the areas I originally wanted (since i had to open the mutual fund account in branch and then convert it to an e-series fund). I moved from my money market and TD Balanced Growth over to a combination of the CDN Index-e, US Index-e, European Index-e, and Int’l Index-E. The items were processed that night and all confirmed fine.
Actually, I just realized that the Europe and International have a ton of overlap . . . looks like I’ll have to drop one. Hmmm, now which to choose? I’m thinking international to include asia . . . I don’t know why I didn’t pick up on that before. Maybe i need to wake up when I’m reading 🙂