I opened an account with A.G. Edwards and sons in 1989 with the intent of long term capital growth. Charlie Core was my agent. During the nine years my account was at A.G. Edwards a margin balance was constantly maintained by Mr. Core and Hugh Cooper, costing us untold sums of money.
At this time the wife and I were young and dumb, I was serving my country in the military, and had no way of knowing how much this was costing us at the time. We had no way of getting ahead with all the margin interest paid. Most of the stocks Mr. Core bought were good stocks with the exception of Pride refineries, and a few others, that was supposed to pay a great dividend.
The stock payed the dividend for a short period and then stopped and the price quickly went from $17.00 to $2.00. Mr. Core never picked a super stock but most not all were steady performers but with the margin interest we were paying on the account there was no way the account could ever make money.
If the account had never had the margin it may have done okay. This is in direct contrast to what we wanted the account to do. Mr Core is a crook just as bad as the rest of this bunch.
We moved the account to Columbus, MS.in 1998 and Hugh Cooper took over. When we transferred my account to Columbus, MS, we told Mr. Cooper that we wanted to get rid of the margin balance and seek growth of the account. The balance when we transferred the account was $125,000.
When the account was at Columbus, Mr. Cooper sold us out of all the core stocks and purchased more risky stocks. We deposited some $60,000 plus the initial $25,000 into the account I borrowed $60,000 out of the account to buy land and not long after that in 1998 the margin calls started.
The agent had me selling all our winning stocks and the buying and selling of stocks went up ten-fold with Hugh Cooper. He was trading stocks in both our joint account and our IRA's. We ended up going from an account worth well over $220,000 to a joint account worth $5,000 and two IRA's worth about $20,000 each.
I found several of the stocks in magazines and asked Mr. Cooper about them, as he was supposed to be the expert. He would tell me the ones that looked good and we would buy that stock. We purchased Applied Materials a disk drive company several times on the way down and that cost us a ton of money.
There were numerous times I would call Mr. Cooper would call me and tell Mr. Cooper to sell some of our stocks and he would assure me it would be okay and talk me out of selling the stocks. When all was said and done I made the mistake of filing a simplified arbitration covering only the 18 months Mr Cooper had the account. We had limited funds at the time and made this mistake.
Between the two brokers they have destroyed my faith in the system and my confidence in myself. I feel we should be compensated for that also and we would like all the stocks that were in the account prior to the transfer to include all splits, the $48,000 worth of deposits we put into the account, plus the growth and dividends that would have accrued since then.
If this outright theft of our money cannot be restored we will file for arbitration against Mr. Core and Mr. Cooper with the NASD for the entire period the account was with your organization. I feel sure this account would be worth over a million dollars by now without all the margin interest and the loss caused by your thieving brokers.
0 comments