, 1999
For Frazzled Online Brokers,
Technology Is the Problem
By SCOTT THURM
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
"Someday we'll all trade this way," online stock broker E*Trade Group
Inc. advertises. Now that millions of investors are, E*Trade and other
online brokers are in a desperate race to keep up.
Hardly a week goes by without a computer
glitch disabling a major online brokerage;
Charles Schwab Corp.'s system went down
for 20 minutes on Monday. Yet industry
executives and analysts say these outages aren't likely to end soon.
What's behind the trouble? Unrelenting growth has made online brokers
the guinea pigs of the Internet age, pushing the limits of computer systems
and software into uncharted territory.
Here's the challenge: Track investor portfolios and execute thousands of
stock trades simultaneously while serving up continuously updated news,
stock quotes and chat, all without an error. "We're the bleeding edge,"
says Peter Stern, chief technology officer at Datek Online Holdings Corp.
in Iselin, N.J. The central issue, he says, is "how fast can we dish out
information from a database and stick it in [the user's] face."
Online Outages
Recent trading outages at online stock brokerages:
Date
Brokerage
Duration
(minutes)
March 1
Charles Schwab
20
Feb. 24
Charles Schwab
90
Feb. 8
Ameritrade Holdings
28
Feb. 5
E*Trade Group
30
Feb. 4
E*Trade Group
165
Feb. 3
E*Trade Group
75
Source: The companies; WSJ research |
