No wonder they were sold off......................

An Open Letter to the CEO of Prudential Financial:

I read with great interest your effort to increase the commission run of every Prudential broker to the annualized mark of $600,000 or an average of $50,000 per month. What a laugh! Apparently Mr. Ryan you have a very short memory. A decade ago your firm pushed the sales force to dump the toxic waste of limited partnerships on your client base to increase revenues. Look what happened. Several billion in awards later you pulled out of the limited partnership business.

As CEO, your worry about losing a million dollars a day is justified. When we were losing money in the early years of our investment management firm, we didn’t push for more charges, fees and commissions. We tried to do a better job of taking care of our clients and making them more money. But that is the difference between the buy-side and sell-side is it not? Isn’t it true you would have dumped the brokerage arm years ago if you didn’t need those men and women to keep the assets on the books for your mutual fund division? Money would fly out the door if you didn’t have the handholding needed to keep the business on the books. I wonder if it would have anything to do with the performance of those funds?

I was a broker at Prudential more than a decade ago by default. I cringe when I recall the days of George Ball and friends. I doubt if a more worthless management team ever walked the streets of Newark. I became a broker at Prudential simply because they had purchased the bankrupt firm of Thomson McKinnon. One of my fond memories working there was the time the sales desk had come out with an accelerated pay-out, (read much higher commissions) to have brokers purchase for clients shares in some company. What did I do? I looked at the chart of the company, grabbed a sales ticket and immediately shorted hundreds of shares in my personal account. No, I didn’t get the accelerated pay-out on my commission run but what I did get was thousands of dollars in profits in my personal account. Funny how that works isn’t it Mr. Ryan? Coincidence or standard modus operandi? I think the latter.

This has been a tough market. The largest hedge funds in the world shut down last year. I am sorry for the legions of Prudential clients who will bear the brunt of the efforts of your sales force to keep their seats. Down the road, the arbitration’s will come and the cycle will repeat itself long after you are retired. For now, your stock options dangle like gold in front of you. Maybe you should lay off your sales force and concentrate on your brokers clients. In the long run, it just might make you more money.

Best regards,


Dean T. Parisian