Agent99, I've traded with MBT full-time for about 9 months now and have never seen that kind of catostrophic, full service outage occur. They do require you to have a high-quality ISP connection, I don't think a dial-in line would work very well in many cases (depends upon the ISP). But as far as MBT themselves, they have not "gone down and stayed down" in the middle of the day since I've been with them. Terranova's servers have had some occasional, rare "glitches" which last 15-45 minutes, but I've never seen one that stopped me from trading more than a brief time (with MBT, commendably you can call in and both open, and close positions to circumvent the rare brownouts). MBT had a little problem with their routers which was slowing things down, but they've long ago upgraded their network and resolved that.
I've heard this sort of thing (the whole brokerage going down, locking out and inflaming customers) reported for ABW a lot of times over the past three years, though. ETrade does it all the time, Schwab sometimes too; for me it is in the "I'm leaving now" department, kind of offense. Of course, the NASDAQ itself (and ISLD) occasionally go down/slow down, but that effects everyone trading, everywhere.
A brokerage's transition to a new facility would normally be carefully planned with redundancy, and would normally occur incrementally in tested stages, so as not to risk a full, extended disruption in service. If any brokerage were to pull that on me, I would be questioning their lack of operational planning; it's a red flag that you're not dealing with a fully competent or well managed brokerage team.
The thing about ABW is, they have a long history of inflaming their customers with stuff like this. I did a lot of research and this turned up repeatedly. I talked to them and they seemed good enough, etc. but when you go look at the history, it ain't pretty. It goes in waves, the develop big problems, everyone gets mad and leaves, then they make changes/promise to reform, and it improves for a while. That is what spooked me off, I was about to open an account there. I'd still try them if the conditions were right, just an FYI from my brokerage research. I know they brought in a whole new management team to clean it up and take it public, I'd be watching for staying power once they get their act together...
-Steve |
