FWIW, Fidelity also offers online spread orders, 1:1 only. And you'll save significantly on commissions there as well.
and their software systems seem archaic
I used to work at Schwab within ISD which is now SITE, their 'information technology' division. Their systems seem archaic because they are. When Schwab was growing by leaps and bounds in the early 90's, the emphasis was on 'just get it done'. As such, nothing was well organized, nothing was documented, change control was quite often a rubber stamp, etc. etc. Lo and behold all the employees who got stock back then started leaving/retiring and when they went to convert to 'client/server' (read: from the old IDMS system to DB2 & Oracle) and do Y2K remediation, they just couldn't do it smoothly. Based on conversations I've had with folks still there, everyone's afraid to touch anything because at this point, its extremely fragile. Thus, a lot of bugs just don't get fixed. It scares me a bit to wonder where they'll be in 5 years if they don't roll up their sleeves and dig in and start doing something about it now that they have the Y2K resources freed up for other tasks. |
