High risk investments

Dear Mr. Tan,
We the investors can not thank you enough for investing your time and effort in helping us to organise ourselves as nobody else in Singapore would so far.

I am not optimistic that we will achieve anything as we are facing very large financial institutions that have a lot of fire power.

The key to me is in two areas that

1)The sales aid materials and the "misleading prospectus". These are the written evidence. Otherwise the selling process is all verbal between the bank employees and the investors and it is difficult to prove one way or the other.

2) The other is the nature of the products which are extremely high risk now that we are aware of. Even a straight forward product like a local company bond, the retail investor has no access as you need to have S$250,000 as a minimum to invest in. So all other structure products that are available to the retail investors should have a lower risk level that a straight company bond. The financial institutions should not have sold these structured products to the retail investors.

I have read the sales materials and the prospectus before investing and I thought I was investing in the bonds of the referenced entities and the bonds are safely kept by the trustee bank HSBC. Now I know better.

I was prepared to take some risk as I believed that since there are several referenced entities, one failure will only hit the investment proportionately. I never expected that Lehman who is an arranger can wipe off my investment!

REPLY
The financial institution that sold the structured product to you has the responsibility to know the nature of the risk and to advice you appropriately. If they fail in their duty, they should make suitable compensation.