Hello thread. As you know, we monitor this thread regularly to see what is on the minds of some of our most demanding customer segment, you. Datek Online was created for investors like you with exceedingly high expectations and those that really challenge our systems. Your input and persistent challenges keep us at the edge.
Over the past eight trading days we have seen an unprecedented surge in volume, breaking transaction records nearly every one of those days. Yesterday alone we delivered more than 43,000 executions...more than double our daily average from last quarter (Q3-98).
During this time, some of you have noticed delays at peak times, namely the open and the close. As you know, the opening is an extremely difficult time in the marketplace as all of the previous night's orders vie for representation and execution. Between 12% and 18% of Datek Online's daily trades occur within the first 30 minutes of the trading day. More than 5,000 executions occur in the first 15 minutes. We continue to make headway in these areas and strive to improve the system, but the marketplace is complicated at the open.
One of the changes during this process has resulted in browsers displaying the unhelpful "Server Temporarily Unavailable" message. We have made note of this and are making corrections to have Datek's systems return a more informative message. Very often, the servers are available and up, but a particular server may have run out of ports since your last action. You should notice a change to those messages shortly.
When we spoke about "residual e-mails" (yup, that was me who said that, though not 'residual delays' since I don't know what that would mean), I was referring to customer issues resulting from a specific outage for about 45 minutes on Tuesday 11/3/98. Corrective actions have been made to ensure that will not occur again. And of course, yesterday around 10:30, at set of telecommunications lines failed. This resulted in NYSE quotes being erroneous until our telcom vendor could fix the problem. All in a day's work.
Over the course of the next 8 weeks, additional hardware and software upgrades will be implemented. We expect that these will reduce the issues that you all raise. Datek is firmly committed to providing the best access to the marketplace and we feel that we offer unique opportunities to do that. What other brokerage firms allow you to create your own interfaces to the order processing systems like SuperExpress? Very cool tools that allow you to enter orders incredibly fast. That is one of the advantages to Datek Online's open spec.
Perhaps after the holidays, we can arrange for one of the "Silicon Investor Road Trips" to visit our data center. I would hope you would find it interesting and encouraging.
One final note. It is incredibly important to us that we resolve situations where our customers feel that we did not satisfy our obligations to you. While many of us here (Peter Stern, Jeff Citron, Tim Richter, myself and others) read this thread regularly, we cannot address specific instances or problems with a particular transaction. The customer support center has the teams and resources in place to research and resolve issues, and I encourage you to contact them on specific trade issues. They are available from 8am to 7pm currently by e-mailing support@datek.com or by phone at 1-888-Go-Datek.
Those of you who post here represent the type of customer we strive to please because of the way you push the limits of our systems and the marketplace. If we can meet your high expectations, then we are confident that we can meet those of our entire customer base. Your input and comments are valuable tools for us.
Thanks for keeping us on our toes,
Robert Bethge
Vice President, Big Think
Datek Online Holdings
|
