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Strategies & Market Trends : Take the Money and Run -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (2455)	6/8/2002 5:07:05 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17639

Good for you, you should walk if they treat you that way. I use Scottrade, TD Waterhouse, Datek and Schwab, I used to use Etrade and a full service broker. In my opinion you can't do better than Scottrade at this point. I used to think Datek was the best, but I've gotten some pretty lousy executions when I went market, although their options trading might be better and their AH trading is great. Schwab screws you commission-wise on orders over 1000 shares. Maybe their pro interface and commish structure is better, I don't know. Also I find the order entry for TD Waterhouse and Schwab extremely painful and slow. On TD Waterhouse I've never been able to figure out what my cash level is, the interface is designed by a madman. With Scottrade I can do one click orders from the Streamer (sometimes a benefit, sometimes a curse) but what blows me away is the speed of their executions and confirms, $7 for market and $12 limit and there's no size limit so it still costs you $7 even if you are buy 10k shares. I find myself using market orders more and more just because I always seem to get the inside B/A. I only use limit orders for high or low ball offers and thinly traded stocks.

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (2455)	6/8/2002 6:55:23 PM
From: quote 007	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17639

what is the second thing??

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (2455)	6/9/2002 3:46:56 AM
From: Jorj X Mckie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17639

Merrill Lynch Part Deux Now I see why I was asked "what was the second thing". I must have inadvertently erased the second part. As I mentioned, the reason that I went to merrill was the unlimited trading account. That is for a flat commission rate of 1% of my account value, I could make an unlimited number of trades. Well, after two years, they sent me a letter that said that the "unlimited" trading account was now going to have limits and that I was 20 trades away from that limit. So now my deal is this: -Base Commission = 1% of account value -maximum number of trades per year at no extra charge 300 -Additional charge if 300 trades is exceeded = 39.50 per trade As I said, they sent me the notice when I had 20 trades left before they started charging and I have 7 months to go before I reset to zero again. Their online trading sucks, they don't give updates on cash/positions/account balance until 2am pacific time, No way to look up options information. Schwab does all of this in real time. I was willing to deal with the substandard service as long as I had the unlimited trading with a flat rate, but now that they took that away, there is absolutely no reason for me to use merrill. so it was the changing of my commission structure that pissed me off enough to leave them. 39.50 on top of 1%...LOL!!!! FO Merrill Lynch.