You're displaying similar tendencies to some of the other Storm clients I've seen interviewed......don't blame the Storm, blame the banks.
You may wish to consider the following points.......
1. Storm should have converted you to cash, or at least advised you to convert to cash, long before you even came close to margin call.
2. Storm clients, as the ones whose investment funds were on the line, should have kept themselves updated on the state of the market and the economy. Yes, I know you thought you'd employed professionals to do this for you, and you assumed they were competent. But a business owner should never take his managers competence for granted......managers need regular monitoring and guidance, they need to be subjected to regular performance reviews. Stockmarket investment is a business investment just like any other kind of business. The same rules apply.
3. It may have been the banks responsibility to advise you when you were in margin call. Or the responsibility may have belonged to Storm. I don't know. But again I refer to point 1 above......your investments should have been converted to cash long before you were anywhere near margin call. And that responsibility rested firstly with Storm, and secondly with you, the clients, if Storm didn't do it.
As the market fell and fell and fell, and the stockmarket and economic crisis were plastered all over the media every single day, nobody, not Storm, not yourselves, nobody, took the prudent action of extracting you from this perilous situation before the value of your investments was completely decimated.
4. Storm geared you to highly risky levels. Worse still, they appear to have had no contingency plan for minimising the risk in the event of the stockmarket changing direction.
5. Storm slugged you heavily with up front fees that were well in excess of what was normal in the financial planning industry.
I don't think pure greed was at play in the case of every Storm victim. Different people, different situations. Some clients were clearly naive about investment matters, and were simply not aware of the risks they were taking. Some were not wealthy people at all, but were just trying to build up a nest egg so they could be self-funded in retirement. I feel truly sorry for these people.
Then on the other end of the scale are the people who were already wealthy when they joined Storm....many houses owned outright, several million dollars worth of assets, enough passive income to retire in comfort. Not only that, but successful business careers behind them. The sort of people who have much experience of life, have invested money for years, and should have at least a reasonable level of investment knowledge, not to mention a fair level of common sense.
It's these sort of people who cause me to shake my head in disbelief when I hear of them putting all these assets at risk by gearing heavily in something as risky as the stockmarket.
One of these people said they were worth more than 4 million when they joined up with Storm, and they got up to a net worth of 12 million.
I find it hard to comprehend why, on the way to 12 million, they wouldn't have paused somewhere, say at the 7 million dollar mark, and thought something along the lines of the following....
'Let's see - we're worth 7 million. If we put half of that into secure assets such as residential real estate in growth areas, and get 5% annual return, we'll have an annual income of 175k, which is enough to live in luxury for the rest of our lives, help our family, go on overseas trips, enjoy life. Not only that, but our real estate will produce solid capital growth over time. We'll leave the other 3.5 million in the stockmarket, but in a conservative way that won't put the rest of our assets at risk'.
When people are set up for life with many millions of dollars in assets, but heavily gear those assets to get even more wealth and income, it begs the question - 'how much wealth and income do these people think they need?
You don't need a crystal ball to know how much money you'll need to live comfortably for the rest of your life. You need a calculator and a bit of common sense.
These people should hardly be surprised or offended when told they were being greedy.