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From Mark Miller:
As I started looking at the Charles Schwab terms of agreemnt, I started thinking, "This is what I expected." This is a financial institution that has a whole different set of laws that have to be applied to what they're doing. What impressed me though, as I was looking at this is it was relatively clear what I was looking at. There was a lot of it but it was relatively clear what I was looking at.
From lawyer Joel MacMull:
And I think that's important because this is really intended to be consumer friendly, because effectively I think it has to be. We have all these disclaimers, for example, about margin calls and short selling and all of that, because they need to make these disclosures.
One of the provisions in here talks about investment advice. This appears at Subsection 28. And these are the kind of, consumer friendly disclosures I think they have to make. It says "You agree and acknowledge", you being of course the account holder and these terms would apply upon creating a self-directed account under the Schwab brand. It says, "Unless we otherwise agree with you in writing, Schwab will act only as your broker dealer and not as an investment advisor. And your account will be a brokerage account and not an investment advisory account governed by the Investment Advisors Act of 1940."
That's important because what they're saying is we're not an investment advisor. You're creating this account. It's gonna be entirely self-directed.