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Pastimes : Thread Morons -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: INFO_DART who wrote (3728)	8/18/1998 8:04:00 PM
From: EL KABONG!!!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12810

INFO DART, I wonder if these online brokerage guys are laughing all the way to the bank! Possibly, but I believe that a far more likely explanation is that they haven't had as many years to develop expertise like the banks have had. The online discount broker is still in its' infancy stages of development. They don't garner the total revenues (from all sources) necessary to provide the levels of performance that many investors feel justified in demanding. Many of us quickly forget all of the brokerage errors that occurred before online services were available. For example, you ordered a buy of XYZ at market, and the broker thought he heard you say buy SYZ at market. Remember those? And your only recourse was (and still is, as far as I know) arbitration. I think that the online situation has eliminated many more errors than it has created, and those that do occur are sometimes the fault of the investor keying in inaccurate information. Bottom line is that errors can and do happen, whether you're dealing with an online discount brokerage or a traditional broker. I think that you may be a victim of priorities. Right now the number one priority for these guys is to execute trades to generate revenues. They'd like to provide better customer service and facilitation, but they just have so few people and so few dollars to do it with. And the other major problem you're encountering is the very visible lack of computer expertise within these discount organizations. KJC