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

To: - who wrote (5051)	7/18/1999 9:28:00 AM
From: agent99	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7382

There has been some recent downtime at ABW as they have been moving servers from their old offices down to their new Wall Street offices. As you can imagine, customers have not been happy. However, the move was completed last weekend. They noted in an email to accounts that there should be vast improvement now that the move is complete. And they are giving accounts 20 free trades to at least partially compensate for the inconvenience. So far, so good. Last week was great. MBT has also had similar periods of outages in the past. All of these firms seem to have periods when they go down. Unfortunately, as I have learned, it comes with the territory. I have multiple accounts, and would advise others to do the same to the extent they are able, so that at least when one goes down, there's not complete paralysis. One thing that I can't stress enough for any of you considering firms that use Real Tick is that the faster your ISP, the better off you'll be. RT is a complete bandwidth/resource hog. When I started with MBT I had a 56k modem and had miserable problems (alot of traders with 56k seem to be in this boat). After I got DSL my connection problems completely disappeared and similarly I have had no ISP related problems since moving to ABW. Terrific new programs like Qcharts (which, if Townsend doesn't get its act together and upgrade, will leave it in the dust) use far less resources. 99

To: - who wrote (5051)	7/18/1999 9:33:00 PM
From: Shafik Habal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7382

Steve, hope you had a nice wkend. Yes, I do have full acess to ARCA. You can ask other ABW clients if you wish, but from what I understand, you have to REQUEST it (they don't advertise as to offering it at all). I found out from a friend who coincidentally is an ABW client. ABW never notified any of their clients, from what I understand, that you could get ARCA. Prior to switching over the IRAs from other brokers (Fido, Merrill, etc), I personally spoke with a couple people at ABW to make sure I will be able to flip options in my IRAs. I needed to make sure that I wasn't confusing them or myself about this matter. The only other brokerage I know that lets you do this is Lafferty up in Frisco (I assume close to where you live). Someone on another thread (think it was either the "best online broker" thread or "the final frontier-online remote trading" thread) mentioned that Brown allows option trading in IRAs too. Well, when i called Brown, they said the same thing everyone else says: ONLY covered calls. Thus, since Lafferty isn't electronic (phone only), I have found ABW to be the only place to date. With regard to those individuals complaining about "down time" and access problems, I'm a bit baffled. I completed my studies in Cambridge (where i had ISDN and my housemates and I had 5 phone lines, not to mention multiple ISPs) and have since moved to a remote area of the country where all I can get is dialup 56k (actual connection 44 to 46k). So far this year, I have had a problem once in february and one other day this spring and that was it. If someone like me, who lives in the boonies, isn't having any access problems, I wonder whats actually going on with those people who say they're down and can't log on. I don't know, I'm not a techie but seems to me that there's gotta be a logical, rational reason for whatever it is they're experiencing. I will say this, I don't profess to having any intimate knowledge of "ideal connectivity" or knowing which backbone (sprint, uunet, etc) is the best. I have a mom and pop ISP and i'm surrounded by trees and cornfields. I use a quad monitor video card (appian jeronimo j3 quad) so I do have a page setup in RT3 that is receiving a lot of data. I experience no lag and no interruption. Now, i'm not saying I never experienced problems but in the 2+ years i have been w/ ABW, I can count on my fingers (knock on wood) the # of times I've been down. Perhaps i'm just lucky or my mom and pop ISP is pretty damn good....who knows. In addition, I do travel on occasion and look after business interests for my family. I take my laptop and use mindpsring in the states and have used ibm.net and cyber.net overseas in Europe and Asia. Again, no problems that I recall. If you do join ABW or any other e-broker, I'd be interested to know your experiences. Send me a PM so we can communicate via email. Take care my friend, best of luck. Regards, SH