Richard, Gary, All, This is a timely discussion here. I have been using Waterhouse since 1996. They did a fantastic job up until about 2 months ago, and the last 2 weeks they have gotten exponentially worse. I tried to sell a market order of 2500 shares of an OTC-BB stock today to get into ACMM while it was still at $1.06. Even though the bid size was 2500 shares, and I had no restrictions on the trade, my order sat there for 2 1/2 hours before finally selling 200, 200 and 400 shares of my 2500 share order, with the rest unfilled. Needless to say, I missed the opportunity to get into ACMM at the price I wanted. I have had a few market orders that sat all day without executing lately. Limit orders have ceased to work at all. I was in the process of liquidating my Waterhouse account to open a NDB account, but apparently they have the same problems if Gary is unhappy with them. To make matters worse, a Waterhouse rep told another investor that "in the very short term", they would require all OTC-BB stocks to be traded with a live broker over the phone. That will be interesting as Waterhouse is averaging 30 - 60 minute hold times to talk to a broker.
I think today's action was really a wake up call. What happens if you want to get out of OZON with a several hundred percent profit down the road and it just doesn't sell?
I found this web site that ranks online brokerage firms on a monthly basis interesting. The rankings are culled from actual investor feedback on multiple forums. Of special interest is the section where they rank online brokers for the penny stock trader. Sorry Dax, but they seem to be saying that E-Trade is the worst right now, with Waterhouse right with them. NDB actually gets fairly good marks. Check it out at: sonic.net , with their penny stock rankings at: sonic.net
Good luck all.
Jerry |
