Whatever happened to Dean Witter?

Thanks for the blast from the past.

I remembered Sears owning D-W and Discover, but I almost forgot about how the name soon disappeared under Morgan Stanley.

Thinking back, it’s amazing what a conglomerate Sears once was: Dean Witter Reynolds, Discover, Coldwell Banker, Allstate… what am I leaving out? And now it’s basically a pile of dust.

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Whatever happened to Dean Witter?

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A company of zero ethics crooks - one of their brokers moved to EF Hutton and illegally transferred some family stock with them - then churned the account - I still have the letter from DW attorney saying the stock was moved to Hutton without authorization and we could continue to transact as if the account was still w/DW while they retrieved the account. That was a lie. They were complicit in stealing the account and ended up saying it wasn't their fault. Advice - if you own stock, get hard copies of the shares and keep them in a secure location - if you trade online and allow a broker to transact on your behalf, you don't really own anything - good luck.

They went the way of Grayson Moorhead.

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Thinking back, it’s amazing what a conglomerate Sears once was: Dean Witter Reynolds, Discover, Coldwell Banker, Allstate… what am I leaving out? And now it’s basically a pile of dust.

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In the past, someone had mentioned how Sears was basically Amazon back in the day. Now Amazon is buying old Sears stores as their own warehouses.

Amazing how bad some companies are managed.

I started working at Morgan Stanley after the demise of Dean Witter- I’m not sure what happened exactly but it was F’d up!! Sears wanted a dean witter in every mall store so they bought DW but quickly realized that wasn’t going to work so they had to package Discover with DW just to sell it to Morgan Stanley(MS at the time had high end customers/big companies and wanted the common folks too) The topper was the DW CEO wined and dined the board so much he got the job when the companies merged even though MS bought out DW!! And if that isn’t crazy enough, the former MS CEO and about 10 of the old higher ups didn’t get new jobs, just started a campaign to get their jobs back- by advertising in the WSJ etc about how bad the new crew was- and it worked!! They eventually fired the DW staff and hired the old MS staff back, that’s when I started when all the changes were taken place.
All of that happened with the dot com bubble bursting-9/11 recession and MS having some serious fines for insider trading. The DW accounts were pretty much forgotten about and only the extreme high end clients brought under the MS umbrella. Morgan Stanley was in such bad shape at the time they were begging for someone to buy them out (Chase and Jamie Dimon refused to take them for free basically). It’s a wonder they are thriving now.

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Advice - if you own stock, get hard copies of the shares and keep them in a secure location - if you trade online and allow a broker to transact on your behalf, you don't really own anything - good luck.

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Terrible advice.

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Advice - if you own stock, get hard copies of the shares and keep them in a secure location

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Trying to transfer actual stock certificates (left by a dead relative) was one of the biggest PITA I ever encountered. And this was in the 90s before the internet took over.