To: bluejeans who wrote (10194 ) 11/10/1998 11:16:00 PM From: EK Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 16892
They (DateK) are really such liars. FYI, here is the full article Technical Troubles at Datek Spur a Flood of Complaints By CARRIE LEE THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION A glitch at Datek Online has caused sluggish trade executions for some customers of the Internet brokerage firm. The company said the troubles are over, but complaints continue to flow into Internet message boards. Although it's not uncommon for online traders to gripe about their Internet broker, the volume of complaints about Datek posted on the Yahoo! Finance (quote.yahoo.com) and Silicon Investor (www.techstocks.com) Web sites has soared over the past two weeks. Participants have complained about delays in completing trades and about the prices at which trades have been made. A spokeswoman for Datek initially blamed the problems on heavy trading volume. But she said the troubles weren't caused by shortcomings with the capacity of the Iselin, N.J., company's systems. "Datek Online did experience some isolated delays last week, which resulted in an increase in call volume. These isolated delays were due to a technical glitch that has since been fixed. These problems were not capacity related and they haven't experienced any residual delays thus far," Melissa Fox, the spokeswoman, said. "The e-mails that you're seeing on Silicon Investor and Yahoo and other such chats must be some residual e-mails that you're seeing come in," she said. But Esko Jaska, an electrical engineer in Arlington, Va., said problems that he has had the past two weeks with completing orders on Datek continued through Tuesday morning. "In the middle of the interaction a Web page comes up that says the server is no longer working, [and to] try another one," he said. Mark Conway, who trades for a living from his Clinton, Mass., home and has used Datek over the past year, said he transferred $100,000 out of his Datek account on Monday. He said his most recent attempts to trade last Friday were repeatedly stymied. He says that during busy hours near the start and end of each trading day, market orders have taken as long as 15 minutes to execute. Other times, he said, the system freezes after the execution button is hit. "You just sit there and wait. You never get a response," he says. For his part, Mr. Jaska is sticking with Datek. The investor said he doesn't have any plans to cancel his Datek account, but said he doesn't depend on Datek exclusively. "I think it would be dangerous to have Datek as one's only broker. When these problems come up I call a traditional broker and get my trades executed," he said. Ms. Fox said she couldn't comment on any of the specific complaints without more details on the individual transactions. "Problems with execution could be related to a number of outside factors such as market volatility at the time of the trade, or even the customer's Web browser," she says. Troubles with trade executions are especially jarring for Datek, which has long worked to build a reputation for speed. To highlight its efforts in that regard that company has advertised its policy to waive the commission on any trade that takes longer than a minute to complete. The brokerage charges $9.99 for Internet trades up to 5,000 shares. Datek is popular with so-called day traders, investors who quickly move in and out of trading positions, hoping to capitalize on short-term moves in prices. The company, like most other Internet brokerage firms, had managed to avoid a significant number of complaints during the stock market's turbulence this summer and early fall, when the stock market's overall trading volume surged.