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Strategies & Market Trends : Rande Is . . . HOME -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proton who wrote (18300)	1/8/2000 10:35:00 AM
From: Rande Is	Read Replies (7) \| Respond to of 57584

. . . . . . . . On Swindling and Brokerages. . . . The brokers will try to convince you that you are just bitter over incompetent trading. That is a shame. I can tell you that DLJDirect's website has not been able to show executions for about 3 weeks. Once you buy or sell something, you had better write it down, because there is no way to look it up. . .this week even the history only shows 1999. I have a printout of the equity being somewhere in the hundreds of billions on one day. . . I think I will frame it. There is no way to ever know exactly where you stand at a given time, without calculating every trade from the beginning of the day. . . which you cannot do, due to the executions being on-the-blink, and even if you were to do this. . .it doesn't matter much, because the long market value never stops changing. . it changes after the close after the close of after-hours. . while you are sleeping. . when the rooster crows [literally here]. . then when the pre-market begins it keeps on changing. . . and since your equity is calculated from the long-market value, there is no knowing, nor is there a real-time summary that is remotely accurate. Warrants only update nightly. And I have yet to see a HIGHER amount show up in the morning over the prior days close. . . 100% of the time, it is a LOWER amount. And that is simply not logical. I would run to another brokerage if I thought there was one that showed the math from the perspective of the customer and not in such a way that requires college level mathematics to calculate your equity at any given time. But I fear they are all about the same. . . Someone please prove me wrong. I have one brokerage account at another place, where they had the most beautiful. . .simple operation. . .everything was very plain and the alerts were IN YOUR FACE, like it or not. It was truly perfect. Then they UPGRADED their site. Now, it is so complicated, I cannot possibly figure out what is what. . it is impossible to look back at what you bought and how much you paid. . . or [a former broker exposed to me that the ripoffs are intentional and happen on the sells]. . .how much you received upon selling the stock. They no longer show you how many shares you bought or sold or what you paid in your executions. . .just that a trade was executed at a particular time. . . this way, the only evidence YOU have of the trade is what you wrote down on a piece of paper. Jokingly: In that account, stocks go down, equity goes down, stocks go up, equity goes down. . .send in more money, equity goes down. . . hit the jackpot. . .equity goes down. At this rate, if I keep making winning trades, I am going to end up owing THEM money. Oh they are happy to explain it. The same way the manager at Bank of America used to explain my business accounts to my accountant. They love it when you have deposits and debits for the exact same amount of money. . . "This debit cancels this credit, and this credit is reversed out here due to regulation T, so when you credit this debit and back out the original debit, the balance is no longer a positive number. . .and in fact you owe US money. . .so hand it over." Week after week, we would leave there scratching our heads. . . KNOWING we had been ripped off, but unable to prove it. At that time, I declared that someday there would be a course taught at the college level on how to swindle customers out of their own money without leaving a trace. And the course should be called "BankAmericrime". Nowadays, I add 1, 2 or 3 cents or dollars to any round number that might be used more than once in a month. It is like the shell game. . .three card Monty. . . the pea is not under ANY shell and your card is not there. You CAN be swindled, so you WILL be swindled. Like the JCPenney chain that was shut down in Michigan a few months ago, found to be overcharging 1 out of 3 customers. . .like K-Mart somewhere that was proven to have a software patch that overcharged every 3rd customer in each line. . . . Now how many of us truly check each and every item on our bill? They know that. They know that out of 100 customers, only 1 is bound to notice. . .and 9 out of 10 of those will keep their mouth shut. So the actual complaint rate is [guessing] somewhere about 0.1%. Now, how many of us calculate to the penny how much we should have received in our sells and exactly what our new equity balance should be. . . .each day? We are very easy prey for the greedy. . . and who is more greedy than the brokers on Wall Street? They get slammed with fines and prosecuted by the SEC so regularly that it is figured into the cost of doing business. The news stories don't even make CNBC. . .if you want to know which broker was charged with what. . .you have to go to the SEC website and look it up. And the NASD is supposed to regulate the NASDAQ brokers. In the same way the NFL owners association would regulate the NFL owners. "Yeah just let'm do whatever they want, so long as it doesn't embarrass us." I thought freshman algebra was simple. I couldn't get anything but an A. Until the teacher had a different girl grade papers the second semester. . . suddenly my A became an F. . . I was 6 months into the course. . .and hadn't a clue of what I was doing wrong. . .or right for that matter. Who's fault was that? Both our faults, but mostly mine for not realizing what was going on. The bottom line. . . as long as we let these BOZOs get away with stealing our money they will do it. Nobody is going to stop them. So I would like to hear assessments of online brokerages, with regard to the accounting of your money, the clarity of your understanding exactly where you stand at any given instant . . in real time. . . the clarity of confirmed executions with share quantities, time of transaction, transaction numbers, price per share paid or sold, commission amount and total dollar amount of the trade. . . I would like to hear of any clever ways any brokerages have that allow one to see the running balance on a given day, which can be accurately compared back to an agreed closing of the previous day. . . or even settlement date. You can sound off complaints, so we can see the magnitude of the problem. . .but I am mostly interested in finding 1 or 2 brokerages where customers come first and the accounting is super clear. Once we find such, we will attempt to forge an alliance, whereby the brokerage will respond to our requests for even more clarity on our accounts. Now that would be making a change for the better. I don't care how small the brokerage houses are. . . provided they have quick execution online and no waiting to get through on the phones. Tall order, huh? I wonder if it exists anywhere. Rande Is