Etrade: Should've spent less of their warchest on advertising!
Written: Dec 24 '99
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The company I worked for did business with Etrade, so I opened an account there. Man was I unimpressed. The site is always slow (even at the office where we had multiple T3s of connectivity!), sometimes you couldn't reach the site or login at all. Trades are dealt with seemingly haphazardly by their systems, in fact a friend of mine tells a story where he went to sell 10,000 shares of a stock on etrade (never trade such large amounts without a real broker!!) and between the time he sent the order and the time it was finished executing, the stock had dropped 10 points, because it took so long to execute.
Basically, they spent way too much money on advertising, and not nearly enough on technical infrastructure, and it really shows. The site is on average unusable during high volume trading days, which makes this site a horrible place for daytraders.
Also, they ding you on the commissions, and their commission scheme is nearly incomprehensible. On low volume trades, my average cost to trade was $19.95 as opposed to the advertised $14.95.
Oh, and customer service there can really be incompetent (although executing trades by phone, if you don't mind waiting on hold for very long, works well). I don't want to talk to much about my personal money problems with Etrade, but they've really scared me with their inability to service very basic requests, and their ability to throw up red tape.
I also have a Datek account with none of these problems, that is always easily reachable, that has a cool realtime quote streamer app, and that costs a flat rate, $9.95 per trade with no hidden costs. Which would you choose?
Recommended:
No
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About the Author
Member: Joe Rosenblum
Location: Santa Monica, CA
Reviews written: 14
Trusted by: 10 members
About Me: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rosenblum
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