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Non-Tech : Web Street Securities (WEBS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Esteban who wrote (194)	1/10/1998 12:57:00 PM
From: nick nelson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1339

Esteban, Thanks for your thoughtful and moderating posts. I have been daytrading with WSS for about 3 months - my biased observations: 1) They have the quickest and friendliest customer service of any discount broker on the net. I have 3 other brokerage firms and none EVEN comes close to the responsiveness of WWS. Two rings and you have any kind of immediate help and friendly conversation - even during peak market hours... all free 800 numbers. 2) If you trade 1/2 NYSE and 1/2 Nasdaq(1000 > $2.00) your average cost is about $7.50 per trade... cheaper than SureTrade and: a) You get free immediate phone support. b) A free checking account paying 4.70%. 3) I trade allot of shorts and get ~40% of my trades either between the spread or the BID when I'm buying or at the ASK when selling. You can really WORK the spread... and they are definitely on your side trying to get the fill at YOUR price. 4) Fills are instantaneous(and confirmed!) and if you watch real-time quotes and see your trade... check your WSS account and you will see that your trade has already been confirmed and your account balance has already been updated in real-time. They are very fast. 5) They do not advertise allot and therefore are very interested in giving their present customers good service... not just expanding so fast that everyone suffers. 6) I find the high cost of trading stocks below $2.00 a benefit... it keeps me from fooling around in the 'garbage' and tying up money in losers. <ggg> 7) With $25,000 cash you can SHORT $50,000(1000 @ $50) of most stocks. They will bump your 'Buying Power' up to $100,000 dollars and you can enter a order for $100,000 dollars at your own risk... but they let you do it! <ggg> If you are daytrading - be careful of of NYSE daytrading limit rules. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ok! Now the bad stuff! 1) They use US Clearing Corp for their clearing and records... and US Clearing Corp is very bad on records and account money manipulation. Everytime money is moved from cash balance to MMF... it will totally disappear from your account balance for 48 hours. One day your account balance may read $30,000... the next day... you have only $20,000 in your account with only $40,000 buying power not the true $60,000 that you actually should have. Be prepared to see large blocks of money just 'disappear' with absolutely no record of what's happening for about 48 hours. 2) The live daytrading 'Order Status' screen has got to be the worst trading screen I have ever seen. On a 'Order Status' screen I want to see just the live 'open' orders that I am concentrating on right now. Instead, on their order screen you have to sift through garbage for filled, cancelled, pending, rejected orders from up to 3 days of previous trades trying to figure out what's going on right now in today's live trades... it's an absolute nightmare. Anything that's not open, live, or pending and not on todays trading date must be on another history screen... but they just can NOT understand this and are not willing to accommodate the daytrader in this regard. Any orders that are EXECUTED or CANCELED are history and have no business appearing on the live Order Status screen. 3) On Friday, 1/9/98, they began implementing a policy of not confirming cancels while daytrading. Instead CANCELS are coming back on the 'Order Status' screen as PENDING cancels only. The pending cancel remained on my screen for 5 hours and was never updated or confirmed. I will not trade against 'PENDING' cancels which are not confirmed in a timely manner over the NET. A brokerage must be able to CONFIRM cancels within 15 minutes or less otherwise if anyone is interested in daytrading with Web StreetSecurities... forget it - they will not confirm cancels over the Internet. These are just the observation and experience of one WSS trader and in fairness to WebStreet the problems are being caused by US Clearing, but WSS is the lead broker. If you do not mind poor accounting screens and UNCONFIRMED cancels than WebStreetSecurities is a very honest, cheap, and reliable broker. They are definitely on their customer's side and will correct anything in trying to help you... but US Clearing is just really giving WSS a blackeye! Obviously, US Clearing wants to further the interests of it's partner company SureTrade at WebStreet's expense. Joe... your turn... <ggg> nick