Jack, sorry about my mistake on the context of Datek's limit of 5000 shares.
NDB online service is pretty good. I get fairly quick executions (usually less than 1 min., sometimes just a few seconds). I usually get on with no problem. I don't trade every day, and usually don't turn stocks in 1 day. I get 100 free real-time quotes for every trade. I have several thousand quote credits left. I was able to trade on "that tuesday" which everyone is complaining about. I have been able to trade in "cents" if the bid and ask are currently in "cents". I really like it. They do route NASDAQ and OTC through an affiliate company, Sherwood Securities and others. This hasn't seemed to affect my purchase price adversely as long as I remember to limit all trades. Even when I let them go "market", I have been lucky enough to have never been "taken for a ride". I have traded 10000 share OTC blocks twice at the ask using limits. It took about 2 minutes the first time and 1 minute the second. I also like that when you preview an order, they show the size of the bid/ask. That way I know how many shares are offered at that price and I know I can count on waiting more than just a few seconds to fill. I have split spreads, and seen my bid show up on the quotes, and fill in timely fashion anyway. I will be trying out DATEK soon. I just sent them some money last week and am seeing my next stock drop toward my price.
I have seen bad comments on NDB here in the past, but that was before they went online. I signed up with them for online service soon after I had sent them money to trade this year. They had the normal problems at first. I sometimes had trouble signing on, the pages were hard to read, not all buttons worked, etc, but they were very inexpensive as a way to lure us to try them out and work out bugs in their system. They were $12/trade then, no surcharge for listed trades (I think they continued that, but I haven't made any NYSE or AMEX trades lately.) I do pay a few dollars more for limit trades, but make that up sometimes on large orders of 10000 shares. I don't know how many servers they have. If they had a large increase in users, I think they would bog down. Don't know for sure, but it makes sense.
Well, I think this has been long enough so....Stay in the Black! jimS |
