Two weeks.That's how soon letters could go out to the 2,350 investors who have filed claims with the trustee who is liquidating the assets of Bernard Madoff's securities firm. Irving Picard said this morning that he has recovered about $650 million, but has found no evidence that securities were ever bought for Madoff's customers. Picard said he's plowing through 7,000 boxes of documents and trying to uncover accounts at Madoff's offices.

What investors can hope for will not be any sort of restoration of what they thought they had with Madoff. The trustee said he'll be looking to pay claims based on the amount of cash put into Madoff's firm and the amount investors took out. Their statements of what their investments were worth won't be used. One investor asked if they could get interest on what they'd put into the firm and the answer was no, because that's not allowed under the provisions of the Securities Investor Protection Act.

Maximum payout: $500,000 from the Securities Investor Protection Corp. for now. They may be more later, if the trustees uncover where Madoff put their money.

But the likely scenario is that everyone will "share the pain" of not getting all their money back.
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