April 1, 2005
To the SEC
April 1, 2005
Re: S7-06-04 Rule
Point of Sale and Confirmation Disclosures
We have limited information and understanding of the proposed Point of Sale and Confirmation Disclosures. We request that you extend the comment deadline beyond that rather short four-week comment period.
The potential net effect of the proposed regulations may be to reduce the number of investment options that clients may have made available to them. It could delay the time it takes for us to respond to and implement clients interest in various investments. As fee based advisors that use no-load funds, we think the regulations are inappropriate as we understand them, and we have not had enough time to recommend more appropriate regulations. In particular, we suggest that there should be different requirements for fee based and/or no-load oriented investing than there are for heavy commission based investing.
In addition, the emphasis on and projections of future expenses may lead to erroneous conclusions or allow misinterpretation of the importance of various expense calculations. While understanding expenses can be important and we support full disclosure, these regulations may encourage investors to focus inappropriately only on expenses without a corresponding examination of investment performance and other characteristics, including risk, diversification and other potential benefits or drawbacks.
In my 15 years as an investment advisor, I have never had a client request such information at the time of sale or after the sale. The proposed regulations seem to focus on one aspect of many that should be considered in making an investment decision.
In summary, we believe the proposed regulations, as we understand them today, would
1. increase the cost of investing to clients,
2. restrict the number of investments presented to investors and
3. place restraints on how quickly and in what manner investors can implement their investment decisions.
Please extend the comment deadline so a more comprehensive exploration and discussion of the issues can be elicited from the industry as well as the public.
K. Larry Hastie
President
Pattern Recognition Management