Here is my gripe of the day. I decided to open up a new trading account with Interactive Brokers (my gripe is not about them - the concept of the Universal Account is fabulous). During the process I had to fill out 15 forms and read and accept 13 disclosures (other than those within the forms which account for another 8 disclosures). In total, 15 forms electronically signed, and 21 disclosures accepted. Now, I'm not complaining about the forms. Your broker needs the information in order to correctly track, organize and administer your account, and that's not something you want them to mess up. Rather, my gripe is with the disclosure forms. I mean, does anyone actually read all of that legaleze? Ok, I did, and it took me 3 hours to get through it all. Most of the information in these disclosure forms is redundant. You make many of the same promises in the Data Feed Disclosure as you do in the Risk of Trading or the Risk of Leverage or the System Failure Disclosure. I suggest that the fault lies with the lawyers that represent the various vendors to our brokers as well as the lawyers that represent our brokers. Couldn't we streamline the system to be something along the line of "You agree that unless we do something on purpose, or that is so stupid that no one would reasonably do it, that makes you lose money, you won't sue us?" All I'm asking for is a little common sense. The problem with how we handle legal issues in this country (and I've been a practicing commercial transactions lawyer for 15 years) is that we use patches. Someone drafts a decent agreement or form and it gets used. Down the road a problem crops up that no one foresaw and something is added to the form to cover that. Then we use the form for a slightly different purpose so we add something to cover the different thing. Then someone sues over something the form allegedly does not cover, so we add a provision or twelve to cover that. After a while you've got some monster of an agreement or disclosure that is so cumbersome that no one even remembers what it looked like in its simple and elegant beginning. I can't tell you how many times I've read deal documents that make no sense because lazy attorneys are cutting and pasting information about a new deal into an old deal's documents. And that old deal had the same problem so the issue compounds until one day an unsuspecting trader is opening an account and he has to read and sign 21 disclosure forms. It irks me, can you tell?
Have a good weekend and Good Trading!
BTW - nothing in this post is in anyway to be construed against Interactive Brokers. They are just covering their assets, as they were advised to do by their attorneys (the bastards!).
Have a good weekend and Good Trading!
BTW - nothing in this post is in anyway to be construed against Interactive Brokers. They are just covering their assets, as they were advised to do by their attorneys (the bastards!).
