Steve, hope you had a nice wkend. Yes, I do have full acess to ARCA. You can ask other ABW clients if you wish, but from what I understand, you have to REQUEST it (they don't advertise as to offering it at all). I found out from a friend who coincidentally is an ABW client. ABW never notified any of their clients, from what I understand, that you could get ARCA.
Prior to switching over the IRAs from other brokers (Fido, Merrill, etc), I personally spoke with a couple people at ABW to make sure I will be able to flip options in my IRAs. I needed to make sure that I wasn't confusing them or myself about this matter. The only other brokerage I know that lets you do this is Lafferty up in Frisco (I assume close to where you live). Someone on another thread (think it was either the "best online broker" thread or "the final frontier-online remote trading" thread) mentioned that Brown allows option trading in IRAs too. Well, when i called Brown, they said the same thing everyone else says: ONLY covered calls. Thus, since Lafferty isn't electronic (phone only), I have found ABW to be the only place to date.
With regard to those individuals complaining about "down time" and access problems, I'm a bit baffled. I completed my studies in Cambridge (where i had ISDN and my housemates and I had 5 phone lines, not to mention multiple ISPs) and have since moved to a remote area of the country where all I can get is dialup 56k (actual connection 44 to 46k). So far this year, I have had a problem once in february and one other day this spring and that was it. If someone like me, who lives in the boonies, isn't having any access problems, I wonder whats actually going on with those people who say they're down and can't log on. I don't know, I'm not a techie but seems to me that there's gotta be a logical, rational reason for whatever it is they're experiencing. I will say this, I don't profess to having any intimate knowledge of "ideal connectivity" or knowing which backbone (sprint, uunet, etc) is the best. I have a mom and pop ISP and i'm surrounded by trees and cornfields. I use a quad monitor video card (appian jeronimo j3 quad) so I do have a page setup in RT3 that is receiving a lot of data. I experience no lag and no interruption. Now, i'm not saying I never experienced problems but in the 2+ years i have been w/ ABW, I can count on my fingers (knock on wood) the # of times I've been down. Perhaps i'm just lucky or my mom and pop ISP is pretty damn good....who knows. In addition, I do travel on occasion and look after business interests for my family. I take my laptop and use mindpsring in the states and have used ibm.net and cyber.net overseas in Europe and Asia. Again, no problems that I recall. If you do join ABW or any other e-broker, I'd be interested to know your experiences. Send me a PM so we can communicate via email. Take care my friend, best of luck.
Regards,
SH |
