I used to have my $$$ invested with Ameriprise - many thanks to this forum for educating me and my money is much more wisely invested at Vanguard now.
Anyway, the other day I got a phone call from Ameriprise saying that my FA there has been fired for unethical behavior, and that this person was my new FA. I guess he didn't realize I have a balance of $0 there. He said that my old FA was taking her annual fee for fine-tuning clients financial plans, then just giving them their old plan back.
I told this guy that I'm not working with Ameriprise anymore and one useful thing he did tell me about was a site called FINRA -
Financial Industry Regulatory Agency - I didn't know about this, but burried in the information there, you can use their
BrokerCheck to lookup a broker or a firm and see if there were any 'events disclosed about this broker'. He suggested I use this to check out any other FA I deal with.
I just wanted to pass that along in case anyone else finds it useful. I doubt if I'll be working with any FA again, but if I did, a bad mark at FINRA would be very useful to know. However, I wouldn't take a clean record at FINRA as gospel truth, because the FA that Ameriprise just fired still shows up with a clean record.