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Strategies & Market Trends : Online Trading - An Oxymoron? (EGRP, AMTD, NBD, DLJ, SCH) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dow Jones Reporter who wrote (42)	2/5/1999 9:56:00 PM
From: Bob Duncan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50

Update on my Etrade account for Blomberg reporter I spoke with today and all interested. To the Blomberg rep: sorry I misplaced your name and number!: As far as I know, my account with Etrade has been closed. I still have not received a check for my funds that was supposed to be sent out "immediately". All I receive from Etrade's website is a message which says "Please call customer service" (Yeah, right!) I find it interesting that not only can Etrade not fill trades properly, they cannot seem to find the time to write a check to someone who has closed their account. I spent several hours this week on their support line which said "your wait time may be as long as 15 minutes" (after which one whould be on hold for one hour and then be cut off.) The problem with Etrade was and is that they do not provide order fills in a timely manner. I will give you the example which lead to a large disaster - when I went to buy stock in Ameritrade at 60 1/8 a week or so ago (before the run in the shares to over 100) I put in a limit order and watched the stock price IN REAL TIME, drop below that price for about 10 minutes. No comfirmation. Within another ten minutes or so, the stock hit 63 and change and I still didn't know if I had the stock. Since the buy was for 900 shares (a 1800 plus profit if I had the shares) I decided to sell the stock at market, meaning I should get a fill within seconds. The sell order went through at 62 1/2 about 15 minutes later, so assuming I got the stock at 60 1/8 I would have made 1200 bucks. I waited all day only to find out that my original order to buy had not executed. (Actually it was 24 hours or so) So, in short I sold 900 shares of a stock that I did not own which basically made me short the stock. Considering that Ameritrade stock doubled within three days after that you can see why this was more than annoying. It gets worse. I then entered an order to buy 1000 shares to cover the postion, and again confirmations were delayed and I did not know if it was covered or not. Basically at that point I was trading blind. I was using what is called a boxed position where you are short say 900 shares and long 1000 shares at the same time as it allows you to go short by simply selling the long position. I was under the impression that as long as you had your boxed position established by the close of trading margin would not be an issue since there is little risk to the broker with a boxed position. (I also verified this with several traders on this board.) At any rate, because of massive delays on executations and orders filled more than once, at one point Etrade had me essentially SHORT 15,000+ shares of AMTD!!! My account equity was about 14000 dollars the day before that day to give you an idea of how INSANE this was. In other words, Etrade's system allowed someone with 14,000 in equity to have a SHORT position of over 840,000 dollars!! Now, again let me say this was because I was trading blindly to a point and had delayed fills, etc. In one case I made a typo to sell 5,000 shares instead of 500 which lead to part of this. (Of course, I did not see this until I got the execution LATE) Using pencil and paper I was able to estimate the problem by about 2:00. Of course I could not get through to Etrade and was scared out of my mind (I am 23) so I tried to buy back the position. I managed to buy back about 8000 shares at an average price lower than what Etrade essentially established a Short position for in my account, and then Etrade's margin account took over. They put an order in to buy 7,500 or so (roughly) Ameritrade at market, I assume because they finally realized how screwed up things were. Of course, a buy order of that size inflated the price and at 3:05 that day the 7,500 dollar buy order went through at 63 7/16, and by average short price had been about 62 (roughly) so I lost about 12,000K on that transaction! The net loss for all of this for me was about 8,000 or so. Of course, by then I was furious and calling the margin dept. I got through to them around 3:30 and they went on a rant about irresponsible trading and how they were going to close my account and mail me a check for 1184.00 bucks, supposedly all that was left after this disaster. Since then I have not been able to get in touch with them and my emails go unanswered. I am not saying this is not partially my fault. I should not have placed trades without executations that were certain. However, even with this disaster I still made money over the past year and made Etrade 5500.00 bucks in commissions last year. (4500.00 the year before that) Never EVER have I just randomly placed trades which is what Etrade's margin dept. implied. So, at this point I am licking my wounds and wondering what to do next and just happy to not be bankrupt and still be in the black. Good luck to all!

To: Dow Jones Reporter who wrote (42)	2/6/1999 8:37:00 AM
From: Tech Master	Respond to of 50

I use Web Street Securities. I believe that Web Street has the best trading platform on the street..... fast, cheap, and consistent. I particarly like that fact that I can trade options, bulletin board stocks, or listed stocks from one online site. Web Street also offers "One Click Trading" for hyperactive traders which allows you to go in an out of stocks with a single mouse click. A must for serious daytraders. I looked at Etrade, Ameritrade, and all of the rest before I opened my account with Web Street. FWIW- I haven't experienced any system delays or failures in almost one year as a client and I trade every day.