... or is it simply "we want to make you feel good about sending us more money"?
It's so obscure that it isn't even mentioned on the Merrill Edge
home page (though the affiliated
BofA Preferred Rewards program is).
All I can find about it is this reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/5wwhsi/merrill_edge_selfdirected_accounts_now_include/It's got the usual "faster service", help with trading (as though Merrill would tell you to trade elsewhere if your account with them were smaller), and, if you're willing to go up to the $1M tier, level II quotes.
I did find this
job post for a Merrill Premium Services Investment Specialist. The job calls for the specialist to:
- Provide service and support
- Deliver on goals including client satisfaction and retention
- Grow client relationship (sounds like WF) through call campaigns and retention strategies
- Anticipate client dissatisfaction or relationship-risk and work to resolve and exceed client expectations
Comments
We don't have Merrill premium but we have basic trading acct (<1mill)
Wefind it very useful for free trades and lots bond > bbb rated.
Easy buy etf from Merrill... Much better than schwab when you need sell bond it like pulling teeth.. Very hard sell bond there
Doyou have defined benefits or Keough programs and do you highly recommended it
Thx so much
Every brokerage has its strengths. For Merrill Edge, that seems to be the most free stock/ETF trades at the lowest balance levels. Vanguard does better on ETFs (selling all but leveraged ones NTF), but it doesn't offer stocks for free until you get to Flagship level ($1M invested in Vanguard funds).
Merrill seems to suit you well for secondary market, investment grade bonds. It wouldn't work as well for me because it doesn't sell auction Treasuries online (nor new issues of any other kind of bond).
Keogh's - Keep Everything Out of Government's Hands
It's an archaic term. As the IRS notes All they are these days are individual 401(k)s (not SEPs). From Pub 560's intro: "Qualified" means covered under Section 401, not Section 408 which covers IRAs.
As I've written before, I've owned an individual 401(k) with no problems. I know that Vanguard and T. Rowe Price offer no fee individual 401(k)s with Roth options. I don't know of any other providers offering no fee plans with a Roth.
If you don't care about the Roth, then there are lots of other choices, but I never really researched them. (I did check Merrill Edge's individual 401(k), which charges a set up fee, a monthly maintenance fee, and does not have a brokerage window.)
No idea, but it's been around for several years, with me part of it.
The nice, not particularly useful (and not at all WF-like) assistant vice president person who regularly bothers me signs off her ML emails as Premium Elite Services Relationship Manager. So I could ask her if important.
They did gracefully initiate to me the rewards / retention / grow-assets strategies a few years ago, through a direct out-of-the-blue solicitation, which did cause me to move a bunch of Fido accounts, although soon after, the nontrivial reward amounts were matched by everyone else, about.
You probably saw this unhelpful reference too
https://www.merrilledge.com/us-trust
(UST being BoA prvate banking)
The only dissatisfaction I have meaningfully registered, re (un)availability of CAPE, had zilch good result. I guess I wish I were not suckered by zero commissions (free-shipping syndrome) and would move back to Fido. Merrill used to have some fund families free that Fido did not, TRP maybe, but now I think that is no longer the case, at least for anything I am interested in. Oh, they will not let me buy DSEEX, nor convert-reclassify DSENX shares to it, as Fidelity now does almost instantly.
I forgot to add that the biggest moneysaving thing the ML relationship provided seems to have been a seriously low-rate BoA heloc several years ago, which was again on their initiative (in person at the local branch we sometimes use and where we have a discounted SD box).
I have posted most of this before. How Premium is beyond Platinum Honors yada yada is unknown.
When I first opened the account, some Merrill phone rep sent me promo literature about higher bonuses for existing customers.
Not much later, when I stepped into a BofA office (to get some transfer glitch fixed with Merrill), I was pitched a promotion for a higher rate bank account, just in case I had $100K spare cash lying around. Sure.
As it turns out, I now do have some spare cash (not nearly that much) that I thought I might move to Merrill to snag a bonus.
I was recently again at BofA (to get another problem fixed). I casually mentioned that I might transfer some money to Merrill. A Merrill rep immediately started an application without asking me. Not surprisingly, it was set up wrong - I wanted a joint account and the application was for an individual account.
All this product pitching and "anticipating" customer needs, this zeal for pulling in assets sure looks like Merrill reps are getting a lot of pressure to produce. Which explains my curiosity about whether Premium Services, whatever that is, does anything other than paint a bigger target on one's back.
That you have Premium Services and can't say what it does for you is all I need to know. BofA's Preferred Rewards, in contrast, is well publicized and documented, and seems worthwhile if one can take advantage of its benefits - like your reduced loan rate, or my credit card rewards bonuses.
I could have said it meant zero commissions, lower margin, prompter phone pickup and email response (as at Fidelity) and so on, if I knew it to be so, and would've. Maybe it is something no one needs. Certainly my personal rep is not pushy in the way I have experienced with other outfits, but I am pretty good about avoiding pushiness and don't mind it as much as some. It sounds as though most can be all set w just BoA Preferred. I don't know the benefits. Always glad when my ignorance is useful, all anyone needs to know
Not restricted to Gold Priority Investor, but I vaguely recall that years ago, AC brokerage allowed you to make automated periodic investments into existing TF fund positions at $0. Can't find a trace of that now on any webpage.
As to lower margin, zero commissions, etc., with Merrill Premium Services, I suspect that not just some but all of that comes at the lower Preferred Rewards AUM price point. Does going up to Merrill Premium Services ($250K+) improve further on any of these?
Here's something for you (@davidrmoran) to try: call Merrill Edge, and see what automated message you get. Mine says "Thank you for being a Preferred Rewards ... Client". Does yours thank you for being a higher level Premium Elite Services client?
I just called Merrill this morning because I had gotten no response to email I sent two days ago. That email was to confirm that I'd transferred in enough money to qualify for a bonus level.
What I was told was (a) the rep had no access to the email that I'd sent, and (b) the system had not tallied the transfers, likely because I did it in two parts and that would require manual intervention (his speculation), and (c) he would let me know if I hadn't satisfied the bonus amount requirement.
I sure hope you get better service if you have scads of money with them. It seems like whatever they handle needs a human being watching over every step. (Did I mention that they didn't notify me when a transfer request failed?)