Any kind of investment firm likely has 24/7 support, along with online access, and if you see questions with your account you should immediately give them a call and make sure everything is okay. There also are things you can do to reassure yourself that things are not happening to your account:
1)Change the password immediately, and make it something that is not similar to your current one
2)Talk to the firm, more and more places are going to a 2FA scheme (2 factor authentication), where to log in you need a password, then need to enter a challenge code they send via e-mail or SMS. It isn’t foolproof (if the account has already been hacked, they could change the notification number for the challenge code), but once you set it it makes it very difficult for a hacker to get into your account by logging in with your username/password.
3)Some firms also allow you get get SMS or e-mail alerts for changes to your account (I prefer SMS, e-mail can end up in the spam folder and SMS is an instant alert).
I suspect what you saw was some kind of rebalancing, I don’t know your plan, if you pick the accounts or if as in some plans you set the strategy, in the latter one they can rebalance from time to time. They should send you a notice before doing that, but it could have been lost.
OP, I hope you get this figured out and report back what happens. If no money was missing hopefully it is something explainable. I just read an article about cyber security and fraud for personal and retirement accounts and frankly it scared me half to death and I’ll tell you why. The police do absolutely nothing to help you recover anything and if you think the federal government is in position to help you good luck with that.
Therefore, I am going to contact all the companies I have financial relationships with and set up (1) two tiered passwards/logins, (2) text notifications when there are changes to my accounts or activity with my accounts, etc.
This kind of crime is so out of control and so under reported and virtually never prosecuted that if you are not a little scared it is because you might not have been paying attention or don’t have anything to lose in the first place. We work our asses off to accumulate wealth not so some greasy lazy slob somewhere can steal it. He or she won’t ever get caught or punished which adds to how much it aggravates me.
I also strongly recommend using a password manager. I happen to use RoboForm, but there are free versions available. There is no way that I can remember complicated, randomly generated passwords without it. I only have to remember one username and one password (20 characters). Those are also stored in my safe deposit box, and known by DW. It “controls” my Quicken data and app, my CrashPlan cloud backups, my data for filling in forms (SSN, phone, address, passport #, credit card #, etc.) in addition to my financial web site logins. Priceless.
One other piece of advice I’d pass on is that when you get to a box that says “remember this computer” or words to that effect then do not check yes. I don’t access my accounts all that often so I don’t mind using the 2-factor authentication when I do. If my computer were to somehow be hacked so someone else could control it I don’t want it to be “trusted” when it comes to changing my financial data or draining my accounts.
Also on the topic of fraud – some credit cards can be set up to notify you of any transaction made without the card present. I have mine set up this way and a few months ago got a text that my Costco card had just been used in Malaysia. I quickly called the card company and they froze the account, issued me a new card.
“This kind of crime is so out of control and so under reported and virtually never prosecuted that if you are not a little scared it is because you might not have been paying attention or don’t have anything to lose in the first place.”
I think that if someone is not scared it is because they are not paying attention. We all have something to lose, even if it only the well being of whomever is keeping the store going where we obtain our groceries.
Last weekend ( a week ago) H checked his retirement and it reported most of the $ amount was gone. I have the same retirement fund so I then checked mine. It also was drastically lower. We checked again on Monday and all was back to normal.
So OP, if today you are still showing big changes, get in touch with the company immediately. But you may find it is back to normal as we did.
We can only surmise that the company was doing some kind of program upgrading or something. But it could cause heart attacks for goodness sake!