I was recently declared to be a "patterned day trader" per NYSE trading rules. This is not my problem. I trade almost entirely on-line through Wachovia's 'service'. Although I trade every day, generated sometimes more than a dozen trades, I imagine my broker received very little of it and was ultimately not interested in my account or too distracted by the market's recent gyrations in light of the extremely shallow investment advice it provides the elderly (i.E., the meltdown of the financials), and so when he informed me that trading restrictions had been imposed on my brokerage account, he could tell me how to apply them or even what they were. All he could say is "in 20 years I've never seen someone trade as actively as you. These rules are very complicated." After several weeks and numerous requests for some guidelines, I received no specific information. Consequently, I placed a short trade about 10 days ago that netted me an $18,000 profit. Two days later I was informed the trade violated the rules which no one could, or had bothered to try to, explain to me. Wachovia unilaterally swept the money out of my account. They refuse to tell me how much they took. I have asked where I can find the amounts of brokerage commissions they have charged over the past year on my on-line account, but that request has been utterly ignored. To add insult to injury, after I fired off a couple of snippy pissed off emails, the broker responded by claiming he had told me what the rules were "over a dozen times." This is an outright lie; he never told me once, nor could he. Then, following a vanilla call about 2 weeks ago from the branch manager asking me if there was anything he could do for me, and my responding that I was unhappy with the broker, and that no one seemed able to interpret the NYSE rules for me, and during which I advised I was moving over to Fidelity, the branch manager wrote me a letter I received Friday stating that he had gone over these restrictions with me, with is an ABSOLUTE LIE. The letter made it very plain that Wachovia would like me to take my accounts elsewhere.interestingly, I spoke to this same manager last Friday before I returned to my office and found his (undated) 'confirmation' [fabrication] letter, when he asked not to contact the NASD until 'up north' responded to my complaints. Since I am a day trader, and evidently therefor a scoundrel of some unknown sort, I don't take losses hard but instead move on the next trade. For me, this is not about the $18,000 busted trade, but about Wachovia's utter dishonesty. I have sent them elderly clients and friends in the past, and now recognize what a disservice I might have done.
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