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Pastimes : ETRADE Sucks! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HairyWho? who wrote (587)	10/28/1997 8:29:00 AM
From: R. Bond	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3262

Dry Heaves Ho! Stand back around paragraphs 6 & 7. Is Cotsakos a sleezebag or what? Scary. Bond ----------------- Web brokerages survive raucous day with few glitches Reuters, Monday, October 27, 1997 at 22:32 PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct 27 (Reuters) - The central computers of online stock brokerages groaned under a crush of trades at the height of Monday's stock market plunge, but most of them continued to operate without a hitch. The online brokerage sites of companies like ETrade Group Inc., Charles Schwab & Co. and Fidelity Investments each reported slow response times because of record trading activity, but none of them stopped a trade for customers, company representatives said. The online stock-trading business has been doubling every six months by some estimates, yet some investors have been leery about opening online accounts. The emerging industry faces a perception that investors would not be able to execute trades during a stock market crash because of heavy Internet traffic, clogged phone lines and bulky telecommunications connections. The steady performance of brokerage sites on a day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its biggest point drop in history -- 554.26 points to close at 7,161.15 -- could boost the image of the industry. "Today is very much a watershed day in the confidence of the investor," said Christos Cotsakos, chief executive of online trading pioneer ETrade. "The speed to access content, market information and execution was markedly faster electronically than through a human." Cotsakos said E*Trade's online trade execution system performed "flawlessly," even though it faced double the normal trading activity. Other popular trading sites -- such as eSchwab, Fidelity Brokerage Services and Discover Brokerage Direct -- also had record traffic. Representatives of each site said their systems worked without a glitch. "We had no down time," said Blake Darcy, spokesman for investment bank Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette Securities Inc., which runs the DLJ Direct online site. "Trading volume was 40 percent above normal, even considering that (stock exchanges) took an hour out of the trading day." The New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and other exchanges stopped the trading of almost all financial securities for about an hour during the day. Online brokerages, like human brokers, could not execute trades during the halt. (-- Kourosh Karimkhany, in Palo Alto 650-846-5401) Copyright 1997, Reuters News Service