There has been some recent downtime at ABW as they have been moving servers from their old offices down to their new Wall Street offices. As you can imagine, customers have not been happy. However, the move was completed last weekend. They noted in an email to accounts that there should be vast improvement now that the move is complete. And they are giving accounts 20 free trades to at least partially compensate for the inconvenience. So far, so good. Last week was great.
MBT has also had similar periods of outages in the past. All of these firms seem to have periods when they go down. Unfortunately, as I have learned, it comes with the territory. I have multiple accounts, and would advise others to do the same to the extent they are able, so that at least when one goes down, there's not complete paralysis.
One thing that I can't stress enough for any of you considering firms that use Real Tick is that the faster your ISP, the better off you'll be. RT is a complete bandwidth/resource hog. When I started with MBT I had a 56k modem and had miserable problems (alot of traders with 56k seem to be in this boat). After I got DSL my connection problems completely disappeared and similarly I have had no ISP related problems since moving to ABW. Terrific new programs like Qcharts (which, if Townsend doesn't get its act together and upgrade, will leave it in the dust) use far less resources.
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