It's good that the SEC finally caught up with Integral Financial and took action. This company is a total scam. They claim to offer a variety of financial products but all they want to sell you is the highly risky and in my view terrible financial product called structured notes. This product is notorious in the financial world for its high risk, high fees, and illiquidity with very low returns. It is only structured to make Integral very "rich".
All structured notes that Integral sells carry an underwriter fee above 5%. To put this into perspective, the average index ETF fee is 0.23%, the average mutual fund fee is 0.73%, the actively managed hedge fund and most annuity is only 1.4%, and the full service financial adviser that manages the entire portfolio for you only charges about 2%. That's why as soon as they sell it to you, your notes' book value drop to below 95% to begin with. Integral wants to sell you this structured note not because it's a good investment, but only for the high fees they can get. Make no mistake, this is not your typical fixed income that will protect your principles and get your interest. This is the most risky investment you can get as all the underlying investments are contracts for option trading. They try to disguise these risks, but in fact their notes have a significant chance to loose minimum of 50% of value, and in real cases up to 100% of value. So many of investors bought notes from them lost big.
Integral's structured notes are also completely illiquid. If their notes underlying options contract is trending against your favor, you can't cut the loss and get out. Integral fraudulently claims they can help you to sell the notes in the secondary market, but that is a complete lie: they don't have that phantom secondary market. Your only hope is that the notes' issuer can buy it back. And if they do, you will only get pennies for a dollar.
Stay away from this company. read more