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Non-Tech : Online Broker Down - Sue 'em - EGRP, JBOH, AMTD, SCH, NDB -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Duncan who wrote (33)	2/5/1999 11:04:00 PM
From: Trio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 253

Yours is the first post I've read on this thread - UNBELIEVABLE!!! I trade through Schwab and have never had any serious problems. Any I had they fixed immediately. I'm going to go back through these posts to see what others say about Schwab. Have considered a full discount brokerage B4 but your experience REALLY sways me against it. I'm truly sorry for the loss and pain. FWIW the worst problem I've had with Schwab was for six straight days I was unable to get through on a phone line and was in the waiting que for 5-10 minutes. Regards

To: Bob Duncan who wrote (33)	2/6/1999 9:21:00 PM
From: Hubert Few	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 253

You said:"In other words, Etrade's system allowed someone with 14,000 in equity to have a SHORT position of over 840,000 dollars!!" This happened to me on a smaller scale. I do not have, and had not authorized a margin account. For a period of two days e-trade had "loaned" me several thousands dollars over the total equity in my account. This happened when their page crashed on me in the middle of a confirmation, and somehow the trade went through twice. I raised the question elsewhere.....how in the hell can they stay in business like that? I was lucky and even made a few bucks on the deal, but they never notified me in any way about the mistake. I fully expected at one point they would liquidate and take whatever they wanted had the deal gone bad. Were it not for the horrendous hold times at customer service, I would have made them aware of it immediately. It would seem to me that with "glitches" of this magnitude happening, they better be worrying about the security of the whole system since it is obviously not "fool proof". As for not getting one's money from them, the answer there is pretty simple, you sell everything and write a check on your e-trade account. I guess this is the counter-point to my previous post. I have real mixed feelings about the whole issue.