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Non-Tech : Ameritrade Vs. SureTrade? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patrick T Lavin who wrote (22)	8/16/1998 4:37:00 PM
From: Mike Sawyer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 40

Sorry to burst your bubble Pat... I have finally reached an opportunity to transfer my account from Suretrade to National Discount Brokers ( ndb.com ) since I do not expect any of my stocks to be moving for the next few weeks. Here are the reasons I am leaving suretrade and moving to NDB. Top 5 reasons to drop suretrade for NDB... 1. I never received any information via email from Suretrade that helped. "The Brain" that does all the automated email answering for them is FRIED! I cannot believe that they would continue to use it when it is so terrible. And every email address that they have always goes to the blasted thing. Even as late as a week ago I sent it a question asking if they had a charge for transferring my account to another broker. I have not got a response back but have started the transfer to NDB as of early last week. In the past "The Brain" would send back a reply that had nothing to do with the question. Arrgh! I sent an email to NDB tech support and had an answer from a "real" person in less than 1 hour. And they answered my question with more detail then I asked for and even gave me their name. Wow! What a novel idea! 2. When I have needed to talk with a live person at Suretrade I have had to wait on hold for at minimum 35 minutes and as long as 50 minutes. This was the case in all 3 of my phone calls to them. And one of the time I talked with a person at Suretrade they had the audacity to tell me to send an email to "The Brain"...NOT! I told him that it was the worst thing I had ever seen. He agreed that there were "a few bugs". ROFL! With NDB I called them 2 times so far and the first time I was on hold for 3 1/2 minutes and the second time I was on for just less than 1 minute. One of my questions was about a certain account number pertaining to the clearing house that suretrade uses. I did not know this and needed it to finish my transfer papers. He suggested that I call Suretrade and after I quit laughing and told him that it might take days to get that info from Suretrade, he put me on hold for about 3 minutes and came back with the number. Both times they answered all of my questions and asked if there was anything else that they could help me with while I was on the line. Now that's good service! 3. With Suretrade I am only allowed to enter a price in fractions no smaller than a 1/32 increment. And I cannot put in an order more than 25% off the market price of the stock. This is criminal on a penny stock! With NDB I am allowed to enter in DECIMAL form and can set it for any amount. The rep on the phone told me that I can enter fractions as small as 1/256th if I would like. He said that they were very friendly to the penny players. And they do not have the 25% over market price limit that Suretrade does. Now that's the way to run an online broker!!! 4. With Suretrade, if I have a Nasdaq or OTC stock purchase of over 5,000 shares I must pay a per share charge or break it up into multiple trades and pay the fee for each trade. And to make matter worse I am told that I must also wait for the original trade to be filled before I can place the continuing trade on that stock. This makes it real hard to have quick entry and exits in fast moving stocks. But with NDB I can buy as many shares as I want on a Nasdaq or OTC stock (only limit is 5,000 shares on AMEX or NYSE Listed stocks) and I can break up the order into as many trades as I like and still only pay 1 fee, PER WAY, with a single stock. In other words I can buy 20,000 shares of a penny stock and break it up into 5 trades of 4,000 shares and I would only pay one fee of $19.75 for the trades made in one day on that particular stock. Of course a new day means a new fee if all your trades were not completed in the same day. And a trade in the same stock but in a different direction would mean a second trade fee of $19.75. So a round trip of 20,000 shares would be $39.50. 5. With Suretrade I have no check writing ability and no simple fund transfer system to pay for my trades, at least that suretrade has made me aware of. But with NDB I have an "Easy Pay Funds Transfer System" where I can give them my checking account information and if I need to deposit money to cover a trade before the settlement day I can use a touch tone phone from anywhere and add money to my broker account in one day. This way I can make a trade today, make a deposit tomorrow and have it cleared the following day without ever having to spend money on overnight postage again! That saves me about $12 bucks on a quick unexpected trade that I did not have funds in the account for. And NDB charges NO fee for these services! As you can see, I am very happy I have decided to move to NDB. If Suretrade ever makes some much needed changes that seem to make them more friendly to Nasdaq and OTC traders then I will be back to give them a try. But until then...color me gone! Mike Sawyer