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Eric Masselle Comment On Regulatory Notice 22-08

Eric Masselle
N/A

How dare you even think about making it more difficult for the general public to save for retirement. That you lump inverse funds along with leveraged funds is particularly damaging; you want the general public to try shorting stocks, really? You think that's less difficult than buying an inverse fund? Inverse ETFs are extremely important to my own trading, and have saved me more than once (think early 2020). But your attack on leveraged funds is also completely misguided -- you think you can remove risk from the market? Do any of you own Netflix? Or will you also limit public access to high volatility stocks? You seem to regard us as a bunch of dimwits. We investors will make mistakes, we should be allowed to, and we'll learn from our mistakes. Right now, I'm using a couple leveraged inverse funds as hedges to limit my losses in 2022; if you had limited my access to these funds, I'd have had to sell most of my investments or suffer an even larger drawdown from my other stock positions.

Especially maddening is any thought of restricting inverse and leveraged funds to those of high net worth! You guys are bound and determined to make sure only the rich get richer, aren't you? And I've read that you're considering a "cooling off" period? Are you crazy? Do you know anything about investing? There's a monster industry around technical analysis and measurements of mass psychology to help investors time their entry in and out of an asset ,and you're trying to destroy that? Would investors be able to enter a buy or sell, and then self-extend our cooling off period until we're really ready to take action?

Investors in options are told to read about options, and I can't say that's a bad thing. If we were counseled to read about inverse and leveraged funds, I wouldn't argue; I've already read about them ad nauseam. FINRA is authorized by Congress to protect America's investors by making sure the broker-dealer industry operates fairly and honestly. But FINRA is not authorized to manage my portfolio for me. Please stick to your charter. I'm guessing you're probably protected from class action lawsuits, but if you attempt to limit the general public's access to commonly traded assets I have to believe huge numbers of us, backed by the financial industry, we'll try our hardest to go after you.