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Strategies & Market Trends : Townsend Analytics, Terra Nova, and the Archipelago ECN -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: EEL who wrote (3)	3/2/1999 6:38:00 AM
From: LUANNE CLAY-RUSSELL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10

I tried to get started with MBT last summer but they weren't registered yet in Ohio. Then we had the market downturn and i stuck with Schwab and "position traded". At the end of the year after having traded on-line with Charles Schwab since early 1997 i decided to with MBT or Whatley as Iwas ready for a fast execution system and sick of paying for quotes, level II, etc. I sent MBT my deposit money and $10,000 to SW. That was in the fourth week of January. They had a start date of Feb. 5th. On Feb. 5th (one week after they had my money,etc.) they told me they could not add any new people due to the capacity problem with the townsend realtickIII software. I waited until last week and called and they were finally able to turn me on. the folks there are very nice and helpful. yesterday i received a statement from Terra Nova with a different acct.# under my name. Someone was trading in my name on a bogus account the day before i turned on the software. they asked me if i was sure this wasn't my account. i told them that i applied for one account and do not have any idea why they assigned me 2 acct #'s. Meg was very helpful. She said someone had been making trades on this account and asked me to fax in instructions asking them to close the bogus account. I did that last week and yesterday I received the detail of the trades that went off in my name from Terra Nova. I called yesterday and talked to Phil and he assured me that Meg was handling this. my main account has all of my money in it and i understand (being a newbie) that they reserve your buying power (in red in parm) when you have an open order out (unfilled). I certainly hope that MBT is trustworthy. I want to continue to work with the system and eventually get trading once I am comfortable with it. Someone let me know if this seems suspect or if it is just a strange coincidence. In light of the recent N.Y. Times article the timing on all of this exacerbated my concerns. If we have another big market dip will they go into our accounts to cover other's positions? Will we be able to have access to our money? I know by SEC law none of this can happpen and that is why we have holding companies like SW. Some of the threads on here are scarey in light of this recent occurance. I guess i am just a Columbus girl who needs a little assurance. anyone have any? sincerely, LuAnne