Fidelity Investments reviews

I've repeatedly seen that the people who get promoted and recognized at Fidelity are the loudest suck-ups and Kool-aid drinkers, some of whom are plain incompetent at financial planning. These people get promoted over the humblest, hardest-working people. I've also seen them push a nepo-baby from Financial Representative to Financial Consultant in under 2 years when they tell other people it takes 5-7 years because his relative has been at Fidelity in the local area for decades. The sad part is that the nepo-baby is not even underqualified. Being a Fidelity FC is so ridiculously easy that someone with 1 year of experience and their licenses could do it successfully. Competence may be a net negative at Fidelity because you may end up intimidating your manager, who will step on your career out of jealousy and ego. Though most of my coworkers have been great people, the toxic minority has turned my branch into what other employees have described as "high school". The problem is the incredibly weak branch manager was also a shallow, mediocre person who peaked in high school and had a weird, obvious crush on one of the toxic females creating this environment. Funny enough, that useless manager got promoted to VP when the branch could run without a hitch if he dropped on the face of the Earth tomorrow. I think he proved that he is a reactive manlet with poor judgment, underdeveloped leadership skills, and an inability to see the big picture. Upper management saw this and said he needed a promotion. I wonder how much more of a revolving door of attrition he needs to create before they promote him to market leader. If you couldn't tell so far, management, as a rule, is incredibly weak and incompetent at Fidelity. Again, even more so than other corporations, Fidelity props up good corporate drones and Kool-Aid drinkers, which is what they will look for, especially in their managers. If you even have one non-conformist bone in your body, you are immediately at a disadvantage to the drones with no real skills or personality other than drinking the Kool-Aid well. If you have ambitions to make a lot of money, be a REAL financial planner and not a glorified managed account salesperson, and have a shred of independence in your career, stay far away. The best financial planners are NOT working long, captive careers at Fidelity. They cannot be, because Fidelity advisors do a fraction of the financial planning that fee-only RIAs are doing.

Almost every position is under market by 20-30%. Pitiful raises since the cost of living has exploded. Leadership at the Covington regional center is nepotistic; middle management will lie & manipulate you to keep you where they want, all while they preach career progression as a hallmark of the firm. They'll wait until you get an offer somewhere else and suddenly offer more Chairman Shares(while, again, you were being underpaid the entire time relative to your peers at Schwab or Vanguard). They've even terminated good employees in recent months who've inquired about receiving a better schedule.