Hi Gary,
Thanks for starting this discussion. I had been using Schwab for years but last October, I also opened an account with NDB. I had queried just about everyone I knew who traded online and it seemed to me that it was NDB who garnered the fewest complaints. For that reason, and because I knew that you used them, they were my choice. Up until about the end of the year, I was very happy with their service. Very quick executions, very quick reports back. But over the last few months, their service has been increasingly deteriorating to the point where the last couple of weeks have been just totally unacceptable. Their site has been frequently down; when up, it often took minutes and minutes (sometimes timed out) just to get a trade request in; it has literally taken hours to get filled even if I put in offers for trades above the ask or below the bid, resulting more than once in seeing the stock move out of reach before getting filled. Almost every day this last week I feel I lost more money on their slow executions than I had saved on the literally hundreds of trades I have made with them since October rather than on Schwab. The bad news is that I still have a small account with Schwab and manage an account for someone else on Schwab, and I attempted to make some trades there during the last few days, most notably for OZON, and there was the same poor executions there. I see people complaining about every service, and I think it is happening everywhere.
Yesterday I called NDB to complain and after about a 30 minute wait on hold, I got to speak to a "senior rep" named Dan. As I restrained myself and explained my complaints politely to him rather than expressing the rage I was actually feeling, we had a nice long conversation. He told me that they were simply overwhelmed by the volume they were receiving, that they had thoroughly underestimated what was happening. Furthermore, he explained, they were being attacked by hackers and every outage they suffered as a result caused a backlog that sometimes took them hours to catch up with. He told me that that they were installing filters and firewalls to protect themselves from hackers, that they were trying to hire more traders and they were seeking a wider array of market makers to go through, but then he told me something that kind of alarmed me. He told me that they were planning on moving from their Hanover Place headquarters (just blocks off Wall St) to a new facility in Jersey City that would be better equipped to handle the kind of volume they have been experiencing, but that those facilities wouldn't be ready until May, and because they were making a considerable investment in setting up this new site, they didn't want to invest any money in bolstering the old site for such a short period. I almost lost it there and expressed my dismay that they'd rather report stellar earnings than offer their clients decent service, even if it meant leaving them dangling in the wind and losing money. Well, er, uh, no, he said, but he didn't really have anything real to say to that, so he offered me some commissionless trades to placate me while also apologising for realizing that that hardly made up for untimely trades. Realizing myself that there wasn't much else we were gong to accomplish between us, I thanked him for the free trades but I would be looking for an alternative to NDB, and hung up. While I find it offensive to think I will have wait until May to ever get a timely fill again, at which time this fantastic bubble we are floating on may have already popped, I don't know if there is a real alternative. I will be monitoring this thread closely, however, to find out if there is one, and I will be keeping enough cash on hand to open an account post haste should one appear. Thanks,
Richard |
