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

To: RockyBalboa who wrote (12219)	5/23/1999 2:22:00 AM
From: Sir Francis Drake	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 16892

The more things change, the more they stay the same... Datek spends over $50 million a year on advertising to get more customers. Meanwhile they have serious problems with capacity - again, Friday, I had sloooow servers, both express and regular (and I'm on cable). Here's an article from NY Times: nytimes.com <<NEW YORK -- Arthur Levitt has talked plenty tough about policing the Internet. As chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Levitt is the nation's top investment cop. He has often warned about the dangers of on-line trading and prodded investors to make sure they know what they are buying. He has cautioned on-line brokerage firms against promoting themselves as a means to get rich quickly and urged them to better explain to their customers the risks and costs of trading through the new medium of the Internet. And he has cracked down on Internet investment fraud, dispatching his new cyberforce of Internet regulators against stock touts and illegal securities offerings. All of which is swell. But when Levitt had a chance last week to show that the SEC will do much more than jawbone on-line brokerage firms that put the larger investing public at risk, he pulled up short. The SEC accused Datek Online Brokerage Services, one of the fastest-growing on-line brokers, of dipping into customer funds to meet its own financial obligations, a violation of federal securities laws. Datek did it not once but 12 times in the spring of 1998, the SEC said. In addition to not having the required reserves on hand, the agency said, Datek filed a false report of its capital position with the commission. But Datek got barely a slap on its cyberwrist. In one of those peculiar lawyerly agreements to dispose of the charges against it, Datek admitted nothing but agreed not to do it in the future. The brokerage firm will hire a consultant to make sure that it follows the rules that it may or may not have violated. And the firm agreed to pay a $50,000 fine. That is roughly the amount of trading commissions that Datek earns in the first half-hour of trading each day. And it is minuscule compared with the $50 million that Datek, the fourth-largest on-line broker, will spend this year to promote its services. Datek and other on-line brokerage firms are at the epicenter of a tectonic shift in the nation's securities markets. Island ECN, a Datek affiliate, has filed for permission to become the nation's newest stock exchange. Island and numerous other computerized trading systems have attracted thousands of new investors eager to flex their newly empowered status in the financial markets. That raises questions about whether the regulatory systems built to police an old way of doing business are adequate in a new world. The SEC has already begun to look at whether on-line brokerage and day-trading firms are doing everything they should to protect customers, such as making sure their trades are being executed at the best possible prices. But part of policing is penalizing wrongdoing. Richard Walker, the SEC enforcement chief, says the treatment of Datek was harsher than that in previous, similar cases. And he contrasts Datek's actions, which he said were unintentional and caused no customers to lose money, with cases in which frauds set out to use the Internet to steal money from investors. Certainly the latter such cases are worth prosecuting, but they are the equivalent of sweeping three-card monte dealers off the streets. Victims often ignore very visible warning signs, like something-for-nothing promises, out of greed. The victims of a brokerage firm that is dipping into customer funds, however, cannot possibly know what is going on. They need the SEC to police the market's infrastructure with more than a popgun.>>

To: RockyBalboa who wrote (12219)	5/23/1999 2:58:00 PM
From: Jon Tara	Respond to of 16892

Actually, I prefer the Datek system on shorts. I would much rather see an indicator next to the quote that says whether or not it's shortable, than to have to look it up on a list or to have to go find an e-mail!