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Non-Tech : AMERITRADE HLD A (NASDAQ:AMTD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Feraldo who wrote (1468)	11/24/1999 1:50:00 AM
From: Apakhabar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1848

Feraldo, You need to educate yourself about online brokerages. I don't know what system for executing trades Ameritrade has now, but three years ago when I used them (for two weeks) they were just a relay system with a broker entering orders manually after receiving your emailed order. Of course that is slow. If you're trying to daytrade with AMTD you're simply using the wrong broker and the wrong trading software. What anybody should want is a system that offers some sort of electronic direct access to as much of the markets as possible. Now I use professional trading software, and I execute my own trades with market makers directly. I use SOES, Selectnet, and Island. Most of my trades are executed in less than a second. I have another account, with Datek, which I opened in 1997 after seeing what Ameritrade (then Ceres) had to offer. Datek is not perfect (especially at the open for fast-trading stocks) but they electronically route their trades through Island, which typically executes within seconds, or if nobody has a bid/ask posted on Island, they have it SOESed, which also takes seconds. Although I use Datek strictly for long-term or swing trades (I won't daytrade with it), I never appreciated how well their system works until I used it while watching the market with my software. I could see and time the trades and the executions were impressive. Ameritrade, to my knowledge, has no direct access like this. I'm not shilling for Datek. I tried to daytrade with them for a month using a separate monitor with Level 2 quotes and I experienced many busy-server disasters with them. If you want to daytrade (and by that I mean buy and sell stock many times during the same day) to any extent (even as a hobby) you simply must get professional software even if it costs you a few hundred dollars more a month than what you pay Ameritrade. If you don't you'll lose much more money from bad fills and other problems. Good luck.