fortrend, page-9

Hi mate

My friends complaints were purely in relation to Fortrend's poor service as a stockbroker. They do not return calls, they send abusive emails, they mucked up some straight forward trades. This was in addition to failing to explain the service proposition to start with including what services were available to teh client online. Basically - a whole heap of procedural & customer service related matters since reflected in ASICS investigations about poor training and failure to respond to even ASIC's enquiries.

These may seem trivial in relation to matters here but I take the view that Fortrend as a company are poorly run and I would be nervous dealing with them due to such a poor track record. The experience of my friends in trrying to resolve disputes with the Principals at Fortrend were not pretty, either. Fortrend were quite abusive - in addition to not even getting their facts straight regarding the dispute to start with.

Here is another link I found when I was doing my own investigations on Fortrend. At one stage I was considering using them for overseas trades but I changed my mind.

http://herdst.com/forumtopic/?id=91&page=1iid=6303&startpage=page0000054&xml=seniorvic.xml
(you need to scroll down to the comment posted by "champion" dated Sep 15, 2007)

The experiences of the person on that link are similar to what friends have related to me about the principal of Fortrend. He is very abusive and facts don't mean too much to him as he often flies off the handle half cocked. Overall: not a "good look" I'm afraid.

FInally, there was also a report in the Melbourne Herald Sun dated 21st November 2008 but the online link is now "dead": "Joe Forster's secrets now out in open" - it was the story about how Fortrend had spent most of 2008 trying to keep details of their battle with ASIC out of the press while it fought to retain its AFSL licence.

In a nutshell: not a company I would choose to do business with, so I hope ESI don't run into any disputes with this guy.

Regards

Coop