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

To: Dan Clark who wrote (11340)	3/24/1999 6:04:00 PM
From: Sir Francis Drake	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16892

Dan - I don't like the new short and marginable stock policies, and I honestly don't know why they are doing this. I can only speculate that they feel compelled to do this - after all, they realize that limiting shorts and non-margining stocks cuts down on trading volue - they can't be too keen on that. So they must have some very good reasons. Maybe some clients went broke and left them holding big debts? I dunno. We don't have all the facts. As for performance with cancelling - obviously I don't like it, but I'm not ready to condemn them. Even though it seems to be happening more recently - they way it didn't use to before, this could be a temporary thing connected with market conditions (?) or order handling and routing - I'm sure Datek is constantly looking into ways to improve their order handling software (at least I hope so) - maybe this is a result of some tweak that backfired, and they'll soon correct it. Then again, maybe this is a bad run of coincidences, I don't have all the statistics. In any case, I remain hopeful. I actually use CyberTrader. I don't want to express any firm opinions, because I haven't been using them for very long. There are tradeoffs. Cyber gives you more flexibility, LII, and has better features. However with the higher commissions (I'm a very active trader) - these advantages can easily be outweighed by cost of trading. Also, I think people underestimate the quality of Datek's executions (perhaps recent performance excluded - and I stress perhaps). When it comes to ISLD orders execution - Datek is superior (and that's the majority of trades I do). With Cyber (and direct order entry brokers such as MB Trading) - you have extra flexibility with routing your order - this CAN be an advantage, but I believe that it takes tremendous skill and knowledge of order routing to truly do better than Datek - and so is useless to 99.99% traders (and not surprisingly, the number of traders who use Cyber is in the hundreds - while Datek...). Further, the software is more twitchy than Datek's, and the short list very restrictive. Also they have daytrading margin policies - trust me, if you use margin heavily, Datek can't be beat. Other little things. I'm not saying Cyber is bad - just that I see no reason whatsoever to transfer completely to Cyber. I also have accounts with other online brokers - and that's the way I like it.