Just want to give you a little opinion from my side. First of all I'm living in sweden and today the market started 10% down. In sweden there are five onlinebrokers, none of them worked correctly or at all today. Some of them didn't respond, server overload. Some didn't accept your login and some just didn't work for some reason.
To route an order in sweden is very easy. We don't have market-makers, just one electronic stocksystem (SAX) that lets traders put in there's bid and ask and execute auto then match. I think it works something like Island. Simple or what?
But all of these swedish onlinebrokers charge more than Datek!!! Well that was just some curiosa. To the point, Datek seems to have some very competent programmers and technical staff. Datek may not always work, but after all they work better or as well as the most of the other onlinebrokers that are avaliable, at least that is what I have understood.
Problem 1 for Datek, and all Onlinebrokers, are when to many people the same time try to login or put in orders. I don't know if the problem is simply the bandwidth from the servers or the power of the servers and databases or what ever, but I believe it's impossible to have that capacity available for all possible market situations, (like this...) that would mean T3 lines normally unused, servers etc... and keep low prices.
Problem 2 seems to be that the orderrouting doesn't work so well like some of you have experienced from normal (human) brokers. I think a part of the routing problem is that all these (concurrent) systems simply don't work well together, something always seems to not be working well, "island orders did not displayed at NASDAQ correctly, marketmakers didn't...., SOES... etc". I haven't understand ecxactly how all this system work, it's so complex if you compare with the Swedish SAX-system. But when it doesn't work, it must be very hard for algorithms to make a good choice or...?
Now, something came up my mind. You all remember how lightningfast everything was in the Datek beginning, because of the small amount customers. They surely could do it again, why not set up something like "Datek Professional" that use the same software that have been well tested during Dateks first year. Give it some very fast servers, a couple of T1 lines to different internetproviders and let it never be a fraction as busy as Datek is today. Charge something like $30-50 a trade (to much?) and hire some really good human brokers that can help the system when things doesn't work and special orders that seems to need human interaction.
The point is that with this high charge, they could guarante "never busy" ultrafast ordering and confirmation... Everything should be designed to keep up with extreme market conditions.
You get what you pay for, right! 99% of Dateks customer probably wouldn't be interested, but some of them would. At least it sounds so after been reading this thread!
Jimmie
Dream a lot
"For two years ago it cost me about $150 to buy an american stock, it took at least one day to know if I got it and to which price"
So I'm not that unhappy with Datek.... |
