Ameritrade SUX!

C

c_verm

I Was using Ameritrade until last week and the worst/best thing happend to me. Their servers went down and I could not exit any of my postions. Once I sat on the phone for 10 min's waiting to talk to someone and then they said try this other server. They never once sent an email to anyone about what to do, why this happend, and a sorry.

This made me look for another firn and now im opening an account with IB. I will save thousands with them its great!!
 
i used to use datek (now ameritrade) before IB. some days they would be so busy i could not log in to my account for like an hour. here's an email i sent to them one time:
Subj: tell ed [Nicoll, datek, ceo] to buy some more servers and give me some free trades

"Server Currently Busy Please try again. This web server is temporarily busy. The server is currently processing too many requests."

first of all, i'm not angry with the person who will actually read this, i know you're just doing your job and want to go home. lol what i want is you to forward this to ed. i already know you are going to write back suggesting that i either try using investmenta.datek.com or investmentb.datek.com or call you on the phone to place orders when you guys get jammed. but if i wanted to make trades over the phone, why would i even have a datek online account? the reason i know what your response will be is because i've been through this before and you guys never change. i always think, "maybe they'll add some more servers to fix this." but then a few weeks later the same thing happens like today.

p.s. i know i'm just #1322 of 2203 people complaining today and nothing will get done, but can you blame me for complaining? is it asking too much to actually be able to log into my account today? how about some free trades or something?
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btw, i never got the free trades.
 
Quote from Gordon Gekko:

i used to use datek (now ameritrade) before IB. some days they would be so busy i could not log in to my account for like an hour.
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You will have bad experiences with all the lowest cost brokers (maybe not all, but all the ones I've tried). IB seems to be very good IMO. The per-share commissions rule out trading really super low priced issues and trading really large orders of higher priced stuff can be done cheaper with a per-order commission, it would be nice to have a really cheap per-order broker along with IB sometimes.

:)
 
Before the merger between Datek and Ameritrade, I visited Datek headquarter in Jersey City, NJ. What surprised me the most was the fact that they had separate trading floor where they held customer's order to trade against their in-house order. And to tell to customers that the servers are busy, hmmm totally against business conduct. 60 sec guarantee is no where outta be. Because they already made their money holding customers' orders.
 
Yeah, it's kind of annoying that they almost never post about application servers or streamer problems on either the Trading Home page or in the Today's Hot Issues section of @nswerBox.

But when investment.datek.com seems hosed, try investmenta.datek.com or investmentb.datek.com. Sometimes completely exiting your browser and starting it up again helps, as this will force a reload of the streamer java app.

Schwab isn't very proactive at announcing Streetsmart Pro server downtime, either - if you call them up they'll tell you the servers are down and offer to have you place a trade with a human for no additional charge, and for an instant I always have this fantasy of making one of their brokers rattle off level II quotes for 15 minutes over the phone to me until I say "OK, trade!", but I chicken out and say, "that's OK, I'll use Velocity". Thankfully, Velocity or the Schwab web site never seem to go down.
 
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