Etrade crashed!

[Adam A]

Etrade is an absolute joke

Happy to take our money with no responsibility of providing a service

Would love to see an email to all clients,with the following!

Due to our inability to provide you with a platform for trading yet again,

please accept a credit for 10 free trades,this is the fourth time this year we have stuffed up,we are incompetent!!!!

 

[Smurf1976]

It's the same with most services that rely on diversity of demand.

Trains, buses, taxis, electricity, phone, internet and brokers are all fundamentally the same. They rely on the (normally correct) notion that not all potential demand will be there at any one time. For example, we won't all turn on every appliance all at once - the grid will fall over there and then if we try. Same as it's assumed that not all customers of any given broker will try and sell / buy shares at once.

The only real solution, and I can hear the howls of protest already, is either very heavy handed regulation, outright government ownership or creation of a single monopoly broker legally obliged to serve all. Either way, get set for $100+ brokerage on every trade.

I've never seen any non-government company intentionally invest sufficiently in order to cover the maximum peak in demand (for anything) whilst allowing for some routine equipment failures etc at the same time.
It's just not profitable to invest heavily in infrastructure that will at best be used once or twice a year and more likely once in a generation.

So Etrade doesn't work on a day of moderately high demand. Just as you can't find a taxi on New Year's Eve and the privatised power companies are bailed out with physical supply by their government owned rivals interstate every time there's high demand.

Reason for all of this? It's just not profitable to meet all possible demand be it for brokerage, taxis, power or anything else. Government will do it for broader economic and political reasons, private enterprise won't because it's not profitable for them.

Give us a proper market crash and I'd be highly surprised if there's any broker that meets all of thier customers' attempts to buy or sell. Indeed the ASX itself could well lock up under that scenario - odds are they haven't invested in enough infrastructure to cover an outright crash and the huge volume that would generate. The ASX is itself a profit making business after all.

Solution? Either be a high enough volume trader to get very good service from your broker or plan your trading / investment strategy to cope with the inevitable. For most, the latter is the only viable approach.

Nothing is totally reliable. You can have dial-up, wireless broadband and satellite internet. You can have mains power, an inverter with a room full of batteries and a generator as well. You can have 3 computers. You can have an armed guard standing outside your house to protect it all.

Then the whole lot is destroyed when the house burns down.

And the next day the market crashes.

You can't guarantee absolute reliability.

 

[Aurum]

If I try to go to the ETrade Pro tab, I get

Your access to Active Trader products has been locked due to insufficient cleared funds for payment of a previous month’s subscription.

As I typed this the site has started working again. Looks like my order for BHP got filled at the open 31.20

Aurum.

 

[nunthewiser]

would like to repeat that MY etrade and power etrade hasnt missed a beat all morning and i reckon there great

 

[Bin57again]

You have to be positioned to exit before the event...not after the event. Even if you could get in, you'd be at the back of the queue of orders...
Bin

 

[joevilla]

It's the same with most services that rely on diversity of demand.

Well said. insightful. and you're right. either the system is slow for 2 days a year or people must be prepared to pay $100 brokerage per trade to maintain the infrastructure to cope with peak in trading.

RESPECT!

 

[Trembling Hand]

Thats funny I pay $6 per trade and have never heard of IB being down because of a pick up in volume.

Ridiculous.

 

[gav]

Reminds me of the episode from South Park last night.

hahaha, how good was that?! maybe the US economy can be fixed the same way too, just unplug it and plug it back in :

 

[Boggo]

I have not had any issues either today or on any of the past out of the ordinary days.

I use Morrison for equities and derivatives and I use Marketech for ASX Index and equity CFD's.

Both seriously worth a look if you want reliability, just my

Mike

 

[Smurf1976]

A point of clarification as to why that would be necessary.

If you have two or more suppliers (of anything) operating in the same market then it's inevitable that they will compete on price at least to some extent.

Now, if you're forced to compete on price they you're not going to spend a fortune on infrastructure that produces no income and will be used maybe once in 20 years. You thus won't build enough capacity to cope with a major spike in demand.

Same with anything. If you have to compete then you cater to average demand, not peak demand unless someone's paying you specifically for the reliability.

 

[Trembling Hand]

Or Smurf you turn to a bigger company that has MUCH better levels of efficiency. Then you get the best of both worlds, Cheap rates + High capacity.


ALL the retail brokers in Oz are whitebait in a very big pond. Fine for the odd purchase but useless for making money.

 

[nunthewiser]

Or Smurf you turn to a bigger company that has MUCH better levels of efficiency. Then you get the best of both worlds, Cheap rates + High capacity.


ALL the retail brokers in Oz are whitebait in a very big pond. Fine for the odd purchase but useless for making money.

.....has no problems with etrade nor power etrade in even the busiest times and i do ok

 

[white_goodman]

hahaha, how good was that?! maybe the US economy can be fixed the same way too, just unplug it and plug it back in :

brazilian fart fetish pr0n, click lol....

this ghost came in and covered me with an ectoplasm

 

[apra143]

Or Smurf you turn to a bigger company that has MUCH better levels of efficiency. Then you get the best of both worlds, Cheap rates + High capacity.


ALL the retail brokers in Oz are whitebait in a very big pond. Fine for the odd purchase but useless for making money.

Better reliability, cheaper brokerage ... how could you go wrong?

 

[It's Snake Pliskin]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technolo...-market-crashes/2008/09/30/1222651048913.html

It is in the paper.

stops in place....?

 

[Nicks]

Problem is Etrade does charge a premium over other online brokers, so we expect a premium service. It seems like it was the only one that crashed and couldnt handle it. Not to mention their phone lines crashed too!

Smurf you are correct, but then maybe Etrade should be transparent and part of their disclosure and marketing should be that their service is not of any use in a high volume market day. Im not sure they will keep many customers.

 

[nunthewiser]

Better reliability, cheaper brokerage ... how could you go wrong?

I do agree somewhat with this statement , But etrade have been good to me, great service and never have problems , however i do feel for those that had problems yesterday and understand there frustrations as thats the reason i left commsec years ago because of there lack of reliability and costly breakdowns/dropouts. sorry if i sound one eyed on etrade but in over 4 years with them i have had only once where i had to use the phone service from a platform meltdown . intresting article in the paper about yesterday and cannot understand why SOME had no problems whereas others did