Comments on: Online traders cry foul as they get shut out of rally

Web stock-trading accounts are freezing up or slowing down, preventing online traders from taking advantage of an end-of-week market rally buoyed by Wall Street optimism.

[ggmex4wd5sp]

"The Dow rose more than 400 percent at one point on Friday, " really?

[BirdDog01]

I had no trouble trading on TDAmeritrade this afternoon.

[basraw]

this afternoon wasn't the problem on TD.

[winstein]

ETrade was a little slow in the morning, but works fine.

[dargon19888]

You get what you pay for...

You want cheap trades, then you have to expect when there is a surge in market activity, you're going to experience lag times.

[patel5]

I was locked out of Scottrade for a least 10 minutes. I keept getting we application errors when trying to log into my account.

[raylopez]

E*Trade was down today (could not log in) early in the morning but then cleared up.

[tapaskm]

I had problems all mornig with logging in to Ameritrade. First 30 minutes after opening bell, I could not get in and then when i finally was able to get past the login screen, my home page was taking more than 10 minutes and still not showing up (and I have a very very fast internet connection). After a couple of hours, I was able to login and get to my home screen, but on trying to refresh quotes or my position, I was thrown out with a message "To protect your security your session has expired". This is a complely incorrect statement. How can your session expire in seconds when you try to refresh the page. I also got this message many times even though it had been seconds since I had logged in.

I have lost the opportunity for about 2000$ between the selling high and buying low price of the stocks I intended to trade.

Class action - yes - this is a most certain win for Ameritrade customers.

Tapas, NJ

[HighwayHome]

Oh, the horror!

[Trading_JJ]

Unfortunately the online service agreement of many discount brokers indicates that their system will run flawlessly the majority of the time. Technical difficulties are expected and the company is not liable for not being able to log in or system timeouts. As mentioned before, you DO get what you pay for. Try Schwab.com, I have never experienced difficulties trading through them and made alot of money today. The slightly higher commissions is more than made up for with peace of mind and they have excellent customer service and research information.

[jsusanne]

I have found Schwab's customer service to be excellent, and had no problems trading on their Street Smart Pro platform on 9/19- (this is different from Streetsmart.com). They also offered 50 free trades when I initiated my account.
these types of market situations are likely to become more frequent- any strategy that can be put into place to protect you is critical- Schwab allows conditional orders(not available at Scottrade) which is similar to stop limit, but the options of conditions are greatly expanded- You can therefore enter an order ahead of time- but not have it actually be put in the market until the condition is met- this is important for thinly traded markets and keeps you from having to have "mental stops" that you may not be able to initiate for one reason or another.

[ikramerica--2008]

Schwab had the same problem this morning. I could not get on to Streetsmart.com, the active trading service from schwab that is supposed to be for the "important" traders. I also could not get onto the regular site and see my positions. Luckily I had installed streetsmart pro on VMWare Fusion and was able to connect that way. I was able to sell at the peak of the stock I was trying to get out of. It was up 13%. By the end of the day, it was down 7%. I could have lost $1000s of dollars had I not installed that program as a failsafe last week!

[FL-Gypsy]

I experienced no problems at all with E Trade. I was logged on with them the whole trading session. It worked fine with me here in Florida so it may also be that there were problems with an ISP for some of those traders having problems or slowdowns. The E Trade platform was great.