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Non-Tech : Discover/Lombard Brokerage.

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To: General Crude who wrote (45)	2/25/1999 5:10:00 PM
From: Mark Z	Read Replies (4) of 180

Doug I moved my Discover account to Schwab last fall. The 'key' to making Schwab work better is getting into their Signature Platinum program. Requires proof of 48 trades/year or $100k in equity. Their other service levels (Signature Gold, Signature Silver, regular e-schwab) aren't worth it. When the web is down, I've yet NOT gotten to a broker within about 90 seconds. It can take 3-4 minutes with the other services. The other benefit to Schwab is if you trade options. They don't sell options orders to another firm; they have their own presence on all 4 exchanges and they DO work orders. Of about 6 dozen option trades I've placed since switching, the price improvement they've gotten more than makes up for the higher commissions. Finally Schwab's web site is a bit slower than Discover's particularly the order status screen. Where Discover lets you filter for what orders to show, Schwab has no such capability. So if you have a period where you trade frequently, that page gets very full and and can take several minutes to load. Annoying if you're trying to leg into a spread or covered call situation. While Schwab's web site isn't anywhere near perfect in terms of reliability/availability, it beats the pants off Discover. Seems to my cynical mind that Discover has a choice: devote resources to improving the web site/adding more customer reps & brokers and pleasing their existing customers or devote resources to recruiting more new customers. You can judge for yourself which they consider a higher priority. Oh yes, one more thing. Discover currently advertises 24 hour/7 day customer support. Try calling in the evening. You'll get a broker who's not trained on many customer support issues. Blatant false advertising IMO. Since merging w/Dean Witter, Discover has slid straight downhill.

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