I am a former Ameriprise client.  My husband's father used to work for IDS so the choice of Ameriprise was one of family tradition.  We always trusted our advisor and always asked him for conservative management of our funds.

In Sept 2007, we sold a piece of property and had a very large sum of money we needed to park short term.  We told our advisor we were shopping for another piece of property and needed the safest, most liquid place to park our cash possible.

He advised us to put the *all* the money in Nuveen Auction Rate Securities.  He told us it was safer than a money market (backed by AAA rated municiple bonds) and that we could always get our money out with a week's notice.

So everybody probably knows the end of this story.  The ARS market froze in Feb 2008, freezing all our cash reserves.  We'd never received a prospectus or any warning of risk, just assurances that this was the safest, most conservative place to park our money.

Very long story short, Ameriprise has refused to make us whole and we are now waiting for a Finra hearing.

I am making this post in hopes of finding other Ameriprise customers in the same boat and/or Ameriprise advisors who could possibly help us understand how ARS investments were pitched to advisors internally.  Anything that could help our case...

Thanks, Leah Manzari

I am a former Advisor at AMPF.  I can tell you that in 10 years I was never trained to sell ARS Investments.  Sometime in 2007-2008 I recall seeing a policy that prohibited the sale of Auction Rate Securities.  Your issue however is that Nuveem Auction Rate Securities is a Closed-End Fund (CEF) and not necessarily treated like an ARS (even though the underlying investments within the CEF were Auction Rate Securities).  The Advisor would have no compliance issue recommending this investment anymore than he/she would recommending a stock (for example).  I think the issue here is:  Did you Advisor fully understand the investment risk with that particular investment and the liquidity risk in general with Closed-End funds.  I can say that there was LITTLE to NO training regarding Exchange Traded Funds and Closed-End funds in my entire 10 years at Ameriprise.  Sounds like this is an Advisor issue (lack of experience or perhaps competence) and not a systemic issue at AMPF.

The ARS market completely dired up right around the time that you describe.  Few buyers and lots of sellers.  There was a huge supply of ARS and no demand -- it made the value of these securities drop through the floor.  At one point the "Auctions" where they sell these securites actually stopped happening.

Closed-end funds have their own risk associated with them -- liquidity risk.  unlike an open-end mutual fund where there is an unlimited number of shares available to prospective buyers/sellers, Closed-End funds have a finite number of shares to trade and if no one is buying shares of the particular CEF that you own, you CANNOT sell it.  The CEF becomes illiquid.  Some CEF's are very thinly traded to begin with, but when you compound that with a CEF that is holding Auction Rate Securities within, and the ARS market dries up, you have a DISASTER waiting to happen.  I am sorry this disaster happened to you.  Hope you find some resolution.

I assume that's your case in MT. Yours is the only one I know of that relates to Nuveen against Ameriprise. Your attorney should be able to subpoena the emails to determine if they knew Nuveen was going to implode.  For example, I was following the MedCap case against Securities America and there were email exchanges knowing MedCap was garbage. I would suspect there's the same trail with Nuveen.

Good luck in September!  Thousands of readers on this site wish you well, Leah.

Yes I do wish you all the best on your fight against Ameriprise and they will fight. The only thing they care about is getting you to go away with the least amount of effort and the least amount of cost.