I just got a call from a rep at Schwab. He explained to me that the entire issue with it is the number of shares in the account. Becasue I have billions & billions of shares, their system can't handle that. As a result, if I would want to trade BKMPP, they could not handle the trade as a result of them showing that 1 share is equivelant to 10,000. If I did an actual trade through them, it would only trade 1 instead of the 10,000 that each is showing as representing. That certainly makes sense, and I can accept that. If I want to actually trade BKMPP, he added that I would have to get the certificates from the T/A.
That brought up additional questions, and I told him that the answer is not really good enough or acceptable.
First, this is a retirement fund. My money is in here for (among other reasons) the tax advantages that are gotten from a retirment account. What happens if I end up getting the certs? I will end up having to pay taxes on this NOW (upon sales that is), and that's not good. His answer is that they don't know much about the taxes, and to get a good answer I would have to contact a "tax expert." Since Schwab has the retirement fund, I would think that I should be able to talk to someone there who is a "tex expert," but i didn't even address that.
Next, I told him that if it is a software issue, there is no reason why they can't go in & make the field bigger, especially when others have mentioned that their SMALL brokerage is showing everything correctly, so there is no reason why a HUGE firm like Charle sSchwab should have a problem with it. I also mentioned that I work with software myself, and when we have a client who has an issue where a field was not initially setup to e long enough for a required amount of data, we change it in about 2 minutes to allow for that.
At this point, I mentioned that I am not blaming him since he is just the messenger who is telling me what he found out. I also told him that I appreciate him checking into this for me, but the answers that the other department gave him are just no good.
I then went on to say that even if it is an issue with the number of zeroes, there is no reason why they can't split the shares into smaller blocks that can show them all either on different line items or in completely different accounts.
He said he would go back & see if he could get more detail & check into what I was asking, and he will call me back once he gets the info I am asking about.
