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To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (35163)	1/17/1999 9:02:00 PM
From: Dwight E. Karlsen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

"Last Friday, Charles Schwab's online trading was down for about 15 minutes at the opening due to complications from the loading of additional capacity to support the Web site's quote service, says Tracy Gordon, a vice president of corporate communications. She says the firm has not needed to take down the trading system intentionally, despite volume of 70 million hits a day." Last Wednesday, I was visiting my local Schwab office for the last time, to close my account. I was fed up to the max in frustration due to their failure to be able to make option trades online. Oh yes, you can get SPX options, INTC options, etc., but anything that's not popular, all you get is real-time quotes on the option symbol deducted from your account. Click "trade", and it tells you that you have the wrong symbol! Then you have to call them on the phone (a distinctly non-online kind of experience), then they won't believe you right away, and after about 1/2 hour of frustrating waiting, they finally inform you that you are right after all, and the symbol was correct, but that Schwab simply didn't have the symbol in their "trading system". But they do have it in the "quotes system". I feel like sueing the SOBs for bait-and-switch. This stuff has occurred on at least 50% of the option trades I have tried to make via e-Schwab in the last year or so: Nokia options, RUT options, MSH options, YHOO options, etc. Their excuse for not having RUT options in their "trading system"?: "It's just not very popular". Anyway, I told the guy to just close my account and mail me my check for the $6066 that was in there, since they obviously don't want to make my trades online. I'll just go use Discover or ETrade or whatever, and plus get stock trades for a lot cheaper than e-Schwab. IMO e-Schwab offers nothing* over the "cheaper" outfits. e-Schwab's website is almost always slower than molasses during trading hours, to top it off. They lost a customer forever, and I'll never look back.