Fidelity.Com - Clunky At Best
Written: Jan 17 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Quality Company behind the site. Very good customer service.
Cons: Unresponsive, slow to post changes, poor research tools
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| engwall's Full Review: Fidelity Investments |
Note: This review does not cover cost of personal investing, merely the functionality of the site.
I don't do much personal investing, but I do have an old work-sponsored IRA through Fidelity, and a current one through Schwab, so I've had ample opportunity to use both sites. I've used Fidelity enough that it keeps reasonably accurate track of my portfolio, but the site has several limitations, which I will cover here (keep your eyes open for my review of the Schwab site).
First things first, I've never had a problem that a Fidelity representative wasn't more than happy to help resolve. I do not have any problems whatsoever with the company itself.
However, the website does not always do a good job of accurately reflecting the current status of my account. Foremost, the numbers on the summary screen and on the positions screen do not always add up. I'm sure that this has something to do with rounding, since the difference is in the pennies, and when I get my statements in the mail, they match my own records. This is just sloppy math somewhere in the programming. That's not great though, for a financial company.
Also, transactions which I perform online take a long time to show up on the website. The transactions themselves get handled in a timely manner, and I've never had any complaints over how they are carried out. But, it will take days for everything to get sorted out in the account balances online.
I'm similarly unimpressed with Fidelity's research tools. Their end of market quotes don't show up until early next morning, so I have to go elsewhere if I want to see what my funds did that day. As for looking up information about various funds, I can say it in one word: Java. Their Java client based Fund tool is very slow and cumbersome to use. I don't like it one bit. I've used a number of sites for researching funds (just to get different recommendations), and Fidelity's tools are at the bottom of my list. In particular, the search criteria are limited to a rather narrow (and imprecise) set of choices, so it's difficult to compare a set of very similar funds.
Finally, my least important criticism, the site just plain looks shoddy. This is not at all a key sticking point in my review, but *AFTER* they've taken care of the other flaws on the site, they really need to get a good site designer in and overhaul the whole site so that the account interface and the site interface merge into a unified web presence.
The fact that I'm investing in the very long term makes the site tolerable, since I only make changes to my account once in a blue moon. However, were I going to try to be more aggressive and invest in specific stocks, I would want a site that gave me much quicker results and that had the tools I need to make decisions quickly. Maybe their PowerStreet interface is a lot better than what I look at, but overall, I just can't recommend this site for online investors.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
engwall
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Member: Keith Engwall
Location: Chicago, IL
Reviews written: 67
Trusted by: 67 members
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