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Non-Tech : bad experience in Charles Schwab recently -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: VinWood who wrote (117)	1/9/1999 1:32:00 PM
From: EJ	Respond to of 124

VinWood, Your question is timely...Schwab's website cost me $1,400 on Friday. I was trying to sell 2 April 260s on Yahoo. The bid/ask was $115/$116. I put a limit order in at $114 ... to make certain that I would get the trade. As soon as I pushed "Place Order" the system crashed on me...by the time I got them on the phone to sell, I got $107 5/8 for the contracts. I have protested this...but I don't expect that they will do much (so far they have only offered $200 in free commissions... which obviously is unacceptable). Unless, you can show that you lost a lot of money, it's simply not worth the effort to go after Schwab. Personally, I have been with them for over 15 years...it's just kind of hard administratively to leave and open a new account. However, this is the second time in about 5 months where this has happened to me. So now is the time for me to leave. To make it an easy transition, I am going to simply open a concurrent account elsewhere with a check from my Schwab account. I will then do some trades and if I like the new outfit I'll start transferring the stocks as well. Obviously, this will hurt my margin balance and limit my trading to some degree during the transition, but in the long-run it should be positive. The obvious question is where to go? I have heard E*TRADE is having extremely tough time with all their new members...I have filled out the online account with Ameritrade, but I don't know how they are doing... so, I think I am going to go to a local spot here in Houston (Scottrade) which also offers online trading...the theory being that they shouldn't be overloaded... I'd love to hear somebody recommend an on-line broker that is REALLY GOOD ON HEAVY VOLUME DAYS. Eric