I share your frustration and I also believe in equilibrium. This business is no where no equilibrium and in transition period. Therefore, chances are you may find yourself keep changing brokers until we reach equilibrium (in technology). Cause the performance of any system will deteriorate once it passes the optimal capacity. Say at time zero, Broker B is very fast and Broker A is not so fast (beyond optimal capacity). This action will prompt movement from Broker A to Broker B. In the meantime, Broker A will attempt to increase its capacity to deal with the problem. The net result is that you will see that the performance in Broker B will come down because it may pass its optimal capacity. On the other hand, the performance of Broker A may actually go up because of the upgrading when it encounter the over-capacity problem. Now Broker B will have to think about scaling up its system to handle all the traffic. There will a lag time involved. In the mean time, those people moving to Broker B will start to rumble and starts to think about moving the money to Broker C (I believe transfer account from broker to broker is a very painful experience). This phenomenon will persist until what I consider when we reach the "steady state equilibrium" where technology overcomes all these problems. Keep in mind, the first firm which encounters this problem will have distinctive advantage because it has the time edge to deal with it.
Yes, you are right. There are many factors to select an online broker. Factors include your style of investing/speculating, ease of use, name brand, service charge, breadth of products, research support, customer support, economics of scale, convenience (under one umbrella) and many others. Everyone has her/his own criteria to rank these factors and weightings so the selection of a particular OLB will vary from person to person. However, there will a majority group of people (what I consider the silent type) will base on a set of similar factors and weightings to come up with a particular OLB (or a small set of OLBs). It is not too difficult to see this evolving. |
