I felt like it was time for a public service message about Scottrade. Never mind that their Elite software suffered from version upgrade problems on Vista (Vista has only been available for, what? 4 years now?). Let's just focus on executions.
Occasionally, the execution times would be lightning fast. Of course, the bid/ask would show 23.81 and 23.82, and we would go short and get a price of 23.65, but who's counting. Yes, that actually happened. Yes, more than once. No, the bid and ask never went anywhere down there before or after our transaction, and the order size was, like 700 shares, so we sure weren't pushing it down. With our new broker we have never once seen the types of ridiculous prices we would regularly get from Scottrade.
Of course, the execution prices were nothing to the execution speeds. Take a look at some of these gems (the account is now closed, so the account number has been left in). Look at the difference between the time the orders were sent and the time they were actually filled.
http://sullux.homeip.net/scottrade/trades.jpg
No wonder every trade was a loser. Think it was just a one-time thing? Here's another day:
http://sullux.homeip.net/scottrade/more_trades.jpg
Notice that many of the execution times are in the range of 30 to 60 seconds :eek:. The first time this happened, they said that if we hadn't seen any confirmation with a few seconds, we should go ahead and re-submit the order. Yeah, that was great advice.
Now I know what you're thinking. It must have been a technical problem on our side. Well, these incidents happened on different versions of the Scottrade Elite software, on different physical computers, and since we moved in between, even with different ISPs (though always cable). During the problem times, our network metrics showed no problems.
We are using a professional grade router, and in fact these incidents occurred with two different routers. Our computers are healthy and free of viruses/spyware, run Windows Vista Ultimate, and don't have any extraneous programs running (no torrent software or any of that nonsense). The computers themselves are strong and modern, with at least a gig of RAM each and a modern, multi-core processor.
Even after seeing the two images I am providing here, the company still didn't give us anything. In fact, they wouldn't even refund us our $7 fees. I'm not suggesting any particular alternative, I just want everyone to know what kind of company they are. We have switched to MB Trading and are mostly pleased. We are back to making money now that we can get decent executions. For the record, we had used Scottrade for about 8 months, having problems over the last 3 months. We have been with MB Trading for about 2 months with our only problem being a couple of hiccups in the quote server.
Occasionally, the execution times would be lightning fast. Of course, the bid/ask would show 23.81 and 23.82, and we would go short and get a price of 23.65, but who's counting. Yes, that actually happened. Yes, more than once. No, the bid and ask never went anywhere down there before or after our transaction, and the order size was, like 700 shares, so we sure weren't pushing it down. With our new broker we have never once seen the types of ridiculous prices we would regularly get from Scottrade.
Of course, the execution prices were nothing to the execution speeds. Take a look at some of these gems (the account is now closed, so the account number has been left in). Look at the difference between the time the orders were sent and the time they were actually filled.
http://sullux.homeip.net/scottrade/trades.jpg
No wonder every trade was a loser. Think it was just a one-time thing? Here's another day:
http://sullux.homeip.net/scottrade/more_trades.jpg
Notice that many of the execution times are in the range of 30 to 60 seconds :eek:. The first time this happened, they said that if we hadn't seen any confirmation with a few seconds, we should go ahead and re-submit the order. Yeah, that was great advice.
Now I know what you're thinking. It must have been a technical problem on our side. Well, these incidents happened on different versions of the Scottrade Elite software, on different physical computers, and since we moved in between, even with different ISPs (though always cable). During the problem times, our network metrics showed no problems.
We are using a professional grade router, and in fact these incidents occurred with two different routers. Our computers are healthy and free of viruses/spyware, run Windows Vista Ultimate, and don't have any extraneous programs running (no torrent software or any of that nonsense). The computers themselves are strong and modern, with at least a gig of RAM each and a modern, multi-core processor.
Even after seeing the two images I am providing here, the company still didn't give us anything. In fact, they wouldn't even refund us our $7 fees. I'm not suggesting any particular alternative, I just want everyone to know what kind of company they are. We have switched to MB Trading and are mostly pleased. We are back to making money now that we can get decent executions. For the record, we had used Scottrade for about 8 months, having problems over the last 3 months. We have been with MB Trading for about 2 months with our only problem being a couple of hiccups in the quote server.
