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Non-Tech : Datek Brokerage $9.95 a trade -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pat w. who wrote (6278)	12/22/1997 3:14:00 PM
From: pae	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 16892

...afraid of electronic torchers, as charlie scwab says... As an e.Schwab refugee, I believe that Schwab fails to live up to its own hype. I would not be at all surprised to read some morning that the FTC has launched an investigation into false and misleading advertising from Schwab. Since every financial paper and TV show gets a BIG chunk of cash from Charles, investigative leadership will not occur from that quarter. But before you hoist Datek on Schwab's petard, evaluate Charlie by his own standards. You will discover that your balances are updated in a nightly batch job, so once you have traded your balances are a historical artifact. (Datek's balances are up-to-the second almost all the time.) Further, should you attempt to "daytrade" via Schwab, once your total buys for the day exceed your buying power calculated from the night before, all your trades go through the "manual boat" NOT AUTOEXECUTION. So even if you did sell before the second buy, Schwab's systems don't know and you will WAIT WAIT WAIT before execution. Of course sometimes you get a better price 10 minutes later. :-) You may also find that sometimes (this past July for example) Schwab fails to complete month end processing until tuesday noon and thinks nothing of shutting down its 'backup' system and starting the 'production' system at noon. So what if all orders entering before noon (and status thereof) vanish. Even if you had the patience to call long enough to get a human, they couldn't find the morning's orders either. Take this with a grain of salt as I have lost the ability to be impartial with regards to Schwab, but when I see that e.Plumber commerical I regard Schwab as the e.Plumber. In my opinion, e.Schwab support sucks - and given that you can get a much better price on weak support at Datek. (Oh, by the way, Schwab apologized for the early July SNAFUs by waiving the $5/support call charge for all of July. Such generosity.) I've done @100 trades through Datek and am by and large satisfied. Datek trading 9:30-10am IS weak. Schwab does do better there - at 3x the price. But during the day if you try to buy at the bid or sell at the ask you will discover that MASH (Schwab's pet market maker) will not trade if it doesn't make the spread. As to "can't get in" etcetera, I've had more difficulty and slowness with schwab.com than datek.com. Such is the web. Good luck.