I've been dealing with Fidelity for about 10 years, and I have always found their service to be completely professional and reliable. I can say with assurance that their customer service is, without exception, the best of any organization I deal with (not just financial firms). Just recently I moved some of my portfolio to Vanguard to take advantage of the lower fees on some Vanguard funds that were not offered by Fidelity.

I didn't move any of my IRAs though, because I didn't want to make the switch permanent until I had some experience dealing with Vanguard. I am already not too happy with how their accounts are handled. For example, with a Fidelity brokerage account, when you buy and sell funds, all the monies are run through the 'sweep' account automatically. Not so with Vanguard, each fund you buy is a different 'account', and the brokerage sweep account is used only for stock trades--this, IMHO, is a crazy way to do this. It's resulted in my receiving checks for checkwriting privileges on 4 different 'accounts'. I also HATE the fact that they charge a $10 annual fee for each fund that you've got less than $10K in (oh! Wait a minute...I think I understand why they have all these separate 'accounts' now--isn't it at least a tiny bit misleading to call each mutual fund purchased an 'account'? 8-(.

If I were to run into any of the problems that you or others have had, I would immediately move my dollars back to Fidelity--no doubt in my mind!

2old