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Non-Tech : Datek Brokerage $9.95 a trade -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Morpher who wrote (10745)	1/9/1999 11:10:00 AM
From: David Kuspa	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16892

Can anyone give me a link to see the "time and sales" on MDEA for Friday? It's ironic that shortly after posting glowing praise of Datek's performance for me over the month of December, I finally got hit by one of the snags I've read about from others on this forum. I had partial executions of a limit buy order for 500 shares of MDEA at $4 5/8 on Friday, 1/8/99. First I caught 200 shares, then another 270 shares, leaving 30 shares still open for purchase. This is the first time I've had an odd lot transaction resulting from a Datek trade. I watched the ask come down to $4 5/8 and stay there for at least an hour, if I recall. I kept thinking that even though it was an odd lot, it would have to trigger if the ask had come down to $4 5/8. Well, my order sat there with no execution, and eventually MDEA moved up over $5 again. I called Datek and spoke to a rep. He was understanding, but told me that I was lucky to get any of those shares at $4 5/8, since there just happened to be 470 shares available over Island. Checking his "time and sales", at first he said the actual ask never came down to $4 5/8, then he said it might have only been there for a few seconds. When I told him that I had been hitting the quote refresh for over an hour, he said that the quotes were never guaranteed. This is what really upset me, not the odd lot partial buy, but that I had seen the ask sitting at $4 5/8 for so long without my order executing, and that according to him, this was totally inaccurate. Am I missing something here? I got rid of the 70 shares as a market order at $5 3/32, and I got rapid execution, so I can't complain about that. I know that MDEA is a thinly traded stock, and this trade was not a lot of money at all, but I don't like the idea of making trading decisions on quotes that can be totally wrong according to Datek's own admission. D. Kuspa