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Non-Tech : CYBERTRADER -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chris land who wrote (2656)	6/10/1999 3:04:00 AM
From: Tanner	Respond to of 3216

I totally agree. Cyber customers pay a premium for trading with them because Cyber constantly harps on the fact that when you trade with them you pay for a superior product and superior reliability. Unfortunately, their track record for reliability, in my opinion, is horrendous. Several months ago, they had a similar outage where I was unable to get out of a trade for several hours, which I inevitably suffered a loss of over $3,000. I personally spoke with Mark Stryker and explained to him that they should be embarrased when outages like this occur (which at time was quite frequently), and that if they're going to hype themselves as the daytrading platform for the more serious and professional trader, then they should be willing to shoulder part of the responsibility when, by no fault of our own, their systems fail. Further, I asserted that while it would be an impractical business decision to completely compensate every trader for every loss suffered during a system failure, I did argue that compensation on some level was called for. My proposal was that when a trader suffers a loss as a result of a system outage, Cyber should reduce their commissions to around $10 (which is approximately THEIR cost for executing a transaction, plus a modest markup)until a trader can "re-coupe" in commission discounts what they suffered in losses. For example, if a trader loses $1,000 as a result of Cyber's systems crashing, then that trader would receive his next 100 trades at the reduced rate of approximately $10 (assuming their base commission was around $20). If that trader does at least 10 round trips per day (which I think is a pretty safe assumption to make), then thats basically a week's worth of trades at the reduced rate. I thought that this was a fairly equitable solution because it allows the trader to recover his loss by saving on fees what he would normally pay, plus Cyber doesn't have to lose money on any transaction because at least their cost of executing the transaction is payed for; all they're doing is giving up a portion of their profit mark-up. The worse part about this, is that I talked with Mr. Stryker extensively about this, and was told by him that he would definately consider it, and assured me that he would get back to me by the end of the week. However, not only did he never call back, for 2 weeks I sent him an e-mail almost every other day, and left numerous messages for him on the phone. Not once did I ever receive a response. Finally, I was so fed up I decided to move my account to another daytrading firm, and faxed him a letter detailing my reasons. As you might have expected, I never received a response. In my opinion, thats unacceptable. However, the purpose of this post is not to bash on Cyber, but to throw out there the question of what should Cyber do when a trader loses money because of their technical problems. I would think that every trader should be considered a valuable client, and the bottom line in business is that when you have a client who is unhappy, you should go a bit out of your way to try to keep them.