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Etrade problems

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hangseng

Gong Xi Fa Cai
Joined
19 March 2007
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Does anyone one else experience constant problems with Etrade?

All day today, no market depth to review (a regular daily problem), consistently goes down at the most critical times being open and close.
Trying to trade and having the site go down has had a cost of opportunities lost and the inability to exit a trade at a critical point.

Has anyone left Etrade and found anything more reliable? I am just about getting to the point where I have had enough.
 
Yes, I'm considering packing up & heading back to Comsec, although there seems to be mumurs of discontent there as well. While I don't have any critical problems such as in logging in, I do have crashes, using Firefox with Java with WebIress. It also seems very slow to update portfolio refreshes too since going to the new site.
Or, wait till ANZ complete the takeover & see if they fix things?
 
With the market depth problem, i've also noted that for all the companies listed in my watchlists, it notes them as current price 0.00. I assumed given it's Sunday, they're doing site maintenance or something.

I sometimes have issues with the interactive charts using firefox, whereby when a moving average input is entered, it removes all chart information and displays a blank chart. But this isn't a problem if I use IE. I have the latest java aswell, so not sure that's the issue.

Besides those niggling issues, etrade has been fine for me.
 

C losed account last week on account of problems including they sent me account details, log in password, ANZ bank details, etc, all in an unsealed envelope, with the paper half out! When I phoned to complain (took nearly 20mins to answer) I was told it was not offical complaint uless I put it in writing! Gone back to Comsec
 
I've had a few problems with e-trade recently as well.

The most interesting problem I've had so far, is my portfolio came up being worth over $12,000,000 .

Sadly this disappeared when I refreshed the page
 
I went though account setup from the ANZ site and was expecting a similar level of security. Then got in and it showed my login password in my account settings tab plain and clear !

Anyway, I can't do any research on the etrade.com.au site at the moment, but the etradeaustralia.com.au site seems to work ok.

Mike
 

etradeaustralia.com.au market depth is not working at all. On standard use or etrade pro.
 
I seem to have almost weekly problems with these guys, isent them the following email last week.

To whom it may concern,

I have been a customer of E-trade through St george Direct Shares for a while now and would like to continue to use your service for my trading.

For the last couple of months I have had regular problems with the service you provide. It seems like a weekly if not almost daily occurance that your servers are inaccesable and i can not view real
time information on my holdings and portfolio. I have contacted your call centre many times to enquire about the issue and ask is this problem going to be fixed, but it still keeps occuring.
Needless to say this problem could have a profound impact on my holding (especially if it occurs during a major market correction etc as did happen in february and your service was un-avaiable for some time)
and i have no access to my accounts.

I appreciate the fact that your staff offer trade placements over the phone etc when these problems occur, but this is useless without the realtime information to make the decision. As I
have spent alot of money with E-trade placing trades I would like to think that i was been provides a reliable service, but how can I have confidence in this with these continual problems.
Could you please let me know what if anything is been done to fix this, and do you have a commitment to provide a certain level of reliable service?

Your timely responce would be much appreciated

This is there answer:

Dear Karl,

Thank you for your email.

We appreciate your feedback and concerns. We have recently purchased a new server to cope with the increased volume. This should be installed within the next few weeks. Also we are in the process of recruiting new staff to improve call response times. There should be a noticeable improvement within the next month or so.
 
I opened up an account with ETrade a year ago because of all the same problems I was having with NAB! NAB have almost got their act together now, so from hearing you guys I guess I am glad I didnt change everything over, only to have to go through those issues twice!

It seems that problems occur when the Banks sell 'trading' off to a third party, and they get 'unexpected high volume'. Blind Freddy could have told them what the volumes were, why didnt they check out the web usage, that would have told them
 
It's a generic problem with any kind of utility service in a competitive market.

Always having to change suppliers because the moment someone becomes "good", they cut their costs to be "competitive" (ie increase profit since they don't actually drop prices) and then the service becomes basically useless. Then you switch again.

As for capacity, meeting peak demand simply isn't profitable unless you're going to charge for it and private enterprise in general doesn't do things that are unprofitable. Sure, you can have enough capacity to cope under all situations, but are traders willing to have a system where the price of brokerage itself is subject to a market with wild fluctuations? Competition precludes simply charging enough to provide adequate capacity.

Perhaps $5 for a trade mid-afternoon but the exact same trade ends up costing $10,000 in brokerage during a major market move.

Or just stick with fixed prices and accept lack of capacity?

I'd be seriously surprised if more than 5 or 10% of attempted trades with the major brokers actually went through in the event of a genuine market crash. Indeed I wouldn't be that surprised to see it at literally 0%. They cater for average demand, not peak demand, since the latter is a high cost in infrastructure to generate little additional brokerage revenue.

Exact same thing in brokerage, power industry and anything else that requires instant, on demand supply of the product or service and where that demand heavily fluctuates. Either you have a monopoly / regulation and charge to meet the peaks reliably or you have competition and limited capacity above that used on a daily basis (since it isn't profitable).
 
Well I'm having problems again.

Hopefully it's because everyone has gone crazy buying Uranium Stocks.
 
Can't access my p/f at all. Phoned, and they say there is no problem.
He started doing the damned "trouble-shooting" stuff like checking my time and date etc . I lost patience.
 
dame e-trade, i am using etrade through the Stgeorge directshares, this morning when i trying to place order at 10:03 to buy some uranium stocks, the system has delay in response for almost 10 minutes, such opps wasting,
unable to get in better price.
 
same here, unable to login, and once i did log in, went to my portfolio, some random stock came up with random values, looks like im accessing someone else's holdings . considering moving away from etrade, the service is sub standard consider the cost of their brokerage!
 
Having problems with the main site, but managed to get onto power e-trade through the old site. Power e-trade seems to be working ok.
 
Because of continuing problems i have again responded to e-trade with the following

Hi Adrian

Thank you for your quick responce.

It is good to know that you acknolwedge this is a problem and are trying to fix it but just saying in a month or so we "should" see an improvement is not what i wanted to hear. This problem happened again this morning and seems to be an almost daily occurance. Why should i wait around for a month or so dealing with this problem simply to find its still happening in a month or so.

Its not only me who is expressing concern with these on going problems, not only are my friends losing patience but news of your continuing poor service is starting to appear on internet stock forums.

Does E-trade have a higher level service which has better reliability? and if so I feel that this service should be provided to me untill such time as you actually fix the reliability issues.

Can anything be done in the near future to solve this or am I simply going to have to go to a provider you can deliver a reliable service?

perhapes if we all make a statement a sort of petition showing how many dissatisfied customers there are we might get some action
 
I plan to change my broker.I probably can not change etrade, but I can leave. Any recommendation?
 
I use 2 - Etrade and Commsec.

Gotta diversify them brokers in case one goes down
 
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