Fidelity Investments Reviews

This morning I went on-line with Fidelity and started a chat with a simple question about my IRA. I was told that IRA's aren't' dealt with in chat so I'd need to call. Two hours later and after being passed from person to person I ended up in some random voice mail box... I'm giving them one star to offset the five star ratings that they clearly paid for!

They never once contacted me to tell me anything about the fraud or the investigation. I understand that $9,000 isn’t a lot of money, but, it is a lot of money to me. I can say that at this point they have lost me as a customer. They told me once that their intent is to make my account whole with all positions as they were. I cannot recommend them as an investment firm and I would keep my money far far away from them. I believe I am proof that your money isn’t safe in their possession.

Spent the equivalent of DAYS on the phone trying to address issues. Had to drive 1 hour both ways to the branch a couple times just to get a response. In one case, made numerous Customer Service calls trying to get clarity on an open issue with no resolution. Was told that they would respond at a later date with a letter. The letter finally arrived and stated that they were still reviewing the issue and if we had any questions to call their CS department. The infinite loop was never resolved; this behavior was not atypical.

I called the next day and Fidelity told me that it could take another one to two pay periods for them to change it in their system. Now not only do I need this money for my childs medical treatment but to live on as well. This is a terrible, crooked company. I highly recommend you find a different company to do business with. They are dishonest with you about your money and have no urgency to anything in your life. I have never heard of any financial institution refusing to pay out your money when requested.

They're just like a bank with reserve limits and they invest the rest. They must assume once the transition happens, all customers will transfer everything out to cash or other institutions. So, the longer they can stall, ** and not respond the more interest/capitals gains/mutual fund mgt fees, etc. they can collect. It's a penny-pinching scam that frustrates everyone. I like their website interface and stock research, they're well established, so I was considering keeping these transitioned assets with Fidelity under my name. That sentiment is all gone now. Nice job pissing me off defuncted Funkdelity.

At over 50 years old, my wife and I have been very conservative about investing in the past. We had about half of our life/retirement savings in CD’s that were expiring in late 2020. The interest rates were close to zero at that time, so we decided to try investing. He convinced us to split our lifetime savings into three different investments. He presented us with his first proposal to invest our money into one of their VIP annuities. He displayed a spreadsheet showing our money doubling in 10 years. He called this a passive investment with a minimal management fee and very good returns. It was amazing. I jumped on it and told him to invest half of our own lifetime savings into the fund. I signed all the paperwork he gave us because I thought he had my family's best interest in mind.

Now, two years later, I realize that this was a huge mistake. The combined expense ratio and active management fee was over 1.1% and he had made a large commission by selling me this investment. We are locked into this investment until age 59.5. I could only move our money in between their limited options of VIP annuities, which have all performed horribly, and have high expense ratios. There is a surrender fee of 10% if we try to get out of the VIP club before age 59.5. After almost 2 years, the return on this investment is -7% and they had taken over $6k in expense ratio and management fees from us.

We already had about 25% of our lifetime retirement savings in a Fidelity target date IRA fund. His next proposal involved selling us on their actively managed IRA plan. He showed us a slick presentation on how they monitored business cycles to stay ahead of the market. I was blown away, and being a novice investor, did not think twice about the 1.2% management fee for doing this if they could limit my losses during down markets.

After two years of Fidelity active management and paying over $12k in expense ratio and management fees our investment return was -7%. Fidelity active managed accounts are a complete joke. They just initially split the investments into a stock/bond mix and sat on the investments, while only making minimal changes, and completely misread the market cycle. My financial advisor, and portfolio specialist, admitted this to me in a phone conversation this year. Their approach is basically to sit and wait down markets out, meet with you once a quarter to show you a nice PowerPoint presentation, ask how your family is doing and then tell you about their family. Our investments were performing so poorly in mid-2022, that they did not even bother to schedule a quarterly review with me. I had to reach out to them to get one. The first thing they did was ask me about each of my family members and how their activities are going, so I feel like they care about them.

In another conversation with their portfolio specialist in March 2022, he sold me on being more aggressive in my investments, due to the time that I had left until retirement. I, of course, deferred to the specialist’s advice and let them change our stock/bond ratio percentage split from their initial proposal of 70/30 to 85/15. Our total active management IRA investment return approached -25% during this year. The investment fee percentage had increased because they had lost so much of our money. There are total account thresholds that we had to maintain, or our fee percentage increases. Our financial advisor failed to mention this at any time. I did not realize this until I read the fine print in my quarterly statements. He had basically set his company up to collect large expense ratio and management fees from us no matter how much money they lost us.

I emailed him later asking why he did not advise me not to go more aggressive on my portfolio, he said that this was my fault, because it was ultimately my decision, and I had given him written approval in an email. His final proposal was to invest over 25% of our lifetime savings into their Individual TOD stock investments which utilized tax harvesting to help us save money on our income taxes. This would be part of my actively managed account with an additional annual fee of 0.6%. Again, I agreed, after his slick presentation, promising annual returns that beat continually beat the S&P.

Fidelity purchased over 200 stock holdings for me using my savings. They “harvested” over $22k in losses just this year, by selling off the underperforming stocks, then purchasing new ones in their place, to falsely inflate my total return on my account page. Our return on this investment has been -4% in almost two years of management and I have paid them almost $1k in management fees while never at any time beating the S&P returns. Also, tax harvesting does absolutely nothing to help us pay less income taxes during the year. The maximum annual income tax deduction is only $3k. We will be writing off these limited losses for almost the next 10 years, after almost 2 years of tax harvesting.

After I filled out a company survey regarding the services that I had received from my financial advisor, and rating him very poorly, I was contacted by the branch manager. He offered to have a more experienced person oversee my account. I agreed and he scheduled a meeting. One of the first things that he mentioned, is that if I keep investing with Fidelity then I will leave a legacy of $30M to my family. I knew at that time this was another scam and I was nothing but a "cash cow" to them.

After 2 years at Fidelity, I have absolutely no doubt, that their services are not worth the costs. I have paid almost $20k in expense ratio and management fees and my total return was -6%. I have recently liquidated my actively management account and I will probably take the hit to move my annuity, too. Looking back now, I should have invested our money into low cost (0.08%), passive index funds, or ETFs, but my financial advisor and branch manager never mentioned this option at all. One of the first things the Fidelity customer service agent told me, when I called to liquidate my investments, is that I will be charged a pro-rated portion of my management fees. This had solidified my decision and did not surprise me at all. Fidelity tries to collect as much of your money as they can while providing the least amount of service possible.

Under no circumstances should you ever use Fidelity. They have non-existent customer service. You may wake up to find your account locked up. I searched the internet and I am not alone. This has happened to many customers of Fidelity. Just type "Fidelity sucks" and start learning about this company. I beg you. Read the reviews. Listen to the horror stories. Please do not invest with this company, do not use their services and do not let any of your friends and family use this company. This has been an absolute nightmare.

I'm trying to transfer my 401K out of Fidelity as I am no longer contributing to it, but have been told that I cannot due to a.) The rep advised me to take loan instead of making a withdrawal last year, b.) I am still employed with the company (but they're contributing anything either), c.) the rep stated I can't do a payout until I'm 59 or terminate my employment with my current employer, and d.) I can't even roll any money over to an IRA. I was told by my HR benefits specialist that when I signed up for the 401k that "Employees may enroll, change or stop their contributions at any time by contacting Fidelity at www.401k.com or 1-800-835-5097." This is a lie. PLEASE, PLEASE research before you sign up. I wish I had.

2. The manual system. I supplied my credit union account number, routing code, login id and password. When Fidelity tried to login, the initial login was successful, but the credit union asks a security question. The security question came to me, and I answered it. After about a minute I got the response that the credentials were invalid. 3. I spent about all morning trying to resolve this with Fidelity and the credit union. Finally Fidelity tech support said to submit a pdf form for linking accounts. I cannot submit it until I get a "Medallion" certification of the signature. 4. My takeaway is that if you are trying to do something a little out of the ordinary, be prepared for problems, although many people must have used the linking account feature. My respect for Fidelity has moved down a notch.

This particular fund is (supposed to be) composed of shorter duration Treasury Notes so I have no idea how this was down so much. If it is to preserve principal, I cannot imagine that they would be going out a far duration on the bond fund - which would expose it to interest rate sensitivity. If there is a legitimate reason that it is down that much - great, educate me, but if not it looks like you sold me a 529 plan under the pretense of protection of principal at this age and it has failed miserably. When I told the rep this she said "well, every investment carries some risk," to which I replied that I agree with that but the risk/reward with a bond should be much lower than with a stock investment and she had no response.

The idea of having a conservative allocation was to protect the principal (or so that is how it was marketed to me) and they absolutely refused to be of help. I was transferred multiple times and then they told me that an explanation as to how a treasury bond fund had gone down that much fell under "analysis" and they could not assist with that since they don't provide guidance or analysis. Keep in mind that this is a FIDELITY fund that they manage and not one person there could tell me what was in the thing. Information online was clear as mud as well in terms of the bond holdings.

At the end of the call, they took great zeal in telling me that Risk Management was giving me 30 days to move my account. Translation? This is what happens when you ask us questions about our funds and don't like it when we refuse to give you any logical information. As a note, I did not curse/swear/use any slurs, etc. The conversation was factual but they just didn't like being challenged. At this point, I was going to transfer anyhow if this is how they treat customers who call in with simple questions about their funds!

Also, I had a similar experience a month ago with others where they just locked me out of my accounts. No email/text, NOTHING to let me know that they had locked the accounts, I just got a notice that a check was returned as a result of the lock and had to call them. Unbelievable! If you have a question if a customer has fraud - call them! Text, or email! Don't just shut down someone's accounts without notifying them! I also filed a complaint regarding what happened and (big surprise) no one had the courtesy to respond.

Either way, if you want to get locked out of your accounts and not get notified - OR- have what was marketed to you as a safe investment for your Child's education decline dramatically in value and have them offer no explanation why - and then tell you to leave Fidelity within 30 days, then you will find yourself well served here. If, on the other hand you are looking for some semblance of customer service, you will not find it here.

I called in before 1PM on Thursday and they said if I was closing out the account, I had to wait 2 business days for the sale to take place. I insisted that the sale needed to take place that day because the Fed had just raised interest rates, and I wanted to get out of the market ASAP. They told me that it was in my contract with them, too bad. Neither the ETFs or the mutual funds were sold until Monday and it is now Wednesday and I do not have access to my proceeds at a cost of over $20K to me.

The reason I was getting out of Wealth Management was because of, what I considered, a poor selection of mutual funds to my account and other issues discussed here. The majority of the accounts are Fidelity funds, some with low capitalization and less than a 5-year track record. Less than a week after purchase, one of the so-called index funds dropped 16% due to, I think, a capital gains charge. Some of the Fidelity funds only had a 2 star rating due to poor performance.

The first days after starting into Wealth Management, I realized that the funds in my account had no or few index funds as I had been promised. I called my advisor and he apologized and had the brokers make changes, adding more index funds. The problem was that indexes used were not the standard indexes, like the DOW or S&P 500 or MSCI indexes, but were "indexes" set up by Fidelity using their unknown criteria so comparison with other funds was impossible. Also, the entire month I was in Wealth Management, I never knew for sure what the balance in my account was. The Portfolio page and Account Summary page would show greatly different portfolio totals. The top line total and bottom-line total on the Account Summary page were frequently different. I called my Fidelity advisor(s) almost daily and they would give one of the totals seen on the website as the correct number, but the issue was never fixed.

Another big problem is the separation between the people selling the product and brokers administrating the buying and selling of stocks and bond funds. I got into Wealth Management because of my 20-year relationship with one of their financial advisors. I didn't like that he couldn't show me the portfolio that was being offered or any historical data on the portfolio. That would have in the past been enough to make me take a pass on the offer, but at 68 years old, I felt it was time for me to release the reins of my account management. And Fidelity had always treated me well in the past, and as I said above, I had a long-term relationship with one particular advisor at Fidelity. The sales advisors I spoke to were saying the right things, including using words like "Fiduciary" and "no expense ratio charged above the 1.13 % account management fee."

After seeing the actual portfolio and asking about how the expense ratio was refunded back to me, I was told that the expense ratio was an expense I had to pay. “Fiduciary” also went away. While many of the index funds did have nominal 0.10% expense ratios, upon making a spot check of the funds they had investing in, at least one of the funds, FADMX, had an expense ratio of 0.69%, making my yearly costs closer to 2%.

As far as I am concerned, the broker end of business just views the clients as chumps to make money off of. The couple of times I talked to the back-office broker they were arrogant and rude. The holding of money for days before buying and holding of mutual funds for days before selling stinks and opens the opportunity for games to be played with my money. Especially with the attitude shown by Fidelity's brokers. Something wrong is going on here. My advice: Avoid Fidelity Wealth Management.

In the process of undoing/correcting this unauthorized transaction, Fidelity then balked at my re-done Letter of Instruction (LOI) because I only specified the dollar amount of each fund to be transferred, not the share price of each fund to be transferred. After ranting with the Fidelity rep., they told me that they would process the LOI as written. I am waiting to see if they are true to their word. My question for myself is why the hell am I with Fidelity after all of this?