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To: Susan G who wrote (43583)	6/8/1999 6:42:00 PM
From: j g cordes	Respond to of 120523

Internet Broker Study.. Compare your's.. today's news " How Fast Is Your E-Broker? by Joanna Glasner 9:00 a.m. 8.Jun.99.PDT A new survey of online brokers shows big variations in the speeds at which companies serve up Web pages for making stock trades. Of 15 leading online brokers, the speed of delivering pages for a standard transaction ranged from a low of 7.5 seconds at Dreyfus Brokerage Services to a high of 38 seconds at ETrade, according to survey results released Tuesday by Keynote Systems, which publishes several Web speed indexes. "The spread in performance times is bigger than I expected it to be," said Gene Shklar, vice president of Keynote. "But it's still too early to see trends." The results were the first in what Keynote says will be a weekly index. The measurements are based on transactions completed every 15 minutes of the trading day by Keynote computers in 10 metropolitan areas around the United States. Besides measuring speed of delivery, the survey also attempts to track whether transactions get completed successfully. If a broker takes more than 12 seconds, on average, to deliver pages for making a trade, Keynote lists the trade as an unsuccessful transaction. The company says the index measures only the broker's speed, not whether a customer has a particularly slow Internet connection. The survey found that online brokers Brown & Co. and Scottrade had the highest transaction success rates, coming in at 99.3 percent and 97.9 percent, respectively. Suretrade and ETrade ranked last, with success rates of 46.5 percent and 80.5 percent, respectively. Keynote says the index is supposed to help customers -- particularly day traders and others who need to make lightning-fast trades -- in choosing an online broker. The company has already been publishing an index of how fast brokerages serve up home pages, but says it wanted to expand its coverage. Critics of the new survey, however, say it doesn't take into account factors like layout and ease of use, which play a big role in determining how quickly customers can complete their trades. "There's so much more that goes into online investing than just one issue or criteria," said Russell Simon, an ETrade spokesman. ETrade didn't comment specifically on the Keynote survey results, saying it wasn't familiar enough with the study and its methodology, but noted that it is only one of several rankings that purport to compare brokerages. One of Keynote's main rivals in the brokerage indexing business, Gomez Advisors, publishes a seasonal Internet Brokerage Scorecard, which ranked ETrade first. Neither Gomez nor Keynote, however, tracks the speed at which trades are actually executed. The companies say there's no way to automatically record how long it takes for a broker to actually carry out a trade once it's submitted to the brokerage. from Wired Magazine site wired.com Jim