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In 13 years of trading, and 10s of thousands of trades, I have never had any experience like the one I had today. I have been trading with this firm for about a week, and it's also my first experience with DASTrader. So I don't know if the problem is with the firm or not, but I expect it is a problem with DASTrader. (BTW I really have a lot of problems with this software besides what I'm about to describe...see my review in software.# I was short 800 shares of a stock, and I closed my position right before close. I hit the 'buy' button--there is no 'cover' button, so the buy button doubles as a cover button. 2 orders went through, not 1. Now, in 13 years of trading, I cannot remember one other time when I hit a buy or sell button twice, but for the sake of argument let's say I accidentally hit the buy button twice. So the first order covered my short, then another order went through, giving me a position of 550 shares. Fine, maybe I made a mistake, I just want to sell my position of 550 shares.
On DASTrader, there is one sell button. When you're flat, it says 'SHRT' and when you're long, it says 'SELL'. It said 'SHRT', even though I was long. So I changed the quantity to 550 shares, hit the sell button #which again, said 'SHRT', I couldn't change it to 'SELL'#. I got a message that said I didn't have enough buying power. Not enough buying power to close a position? That made no sense.
I got on their live help website. They kept telling me that the market is closed, you can only place an order through ARCA, there's no guarantee you're going to get filled. Yes, I know it's closed. I trade after the market is closed all the time, I know how it works. Whoever I'm talking to is taking their sweet time responding to my questions. No 'hold just a sec while I check your account'. I was very clear describing my problem, and they just weren't getting it. I eventually gave up and called to speak to someone on the phone.
At first I got the same response...the market is closed, etc. After about 10 minutes on the phone, they finally got my position closed out for me. Here's what happened. When the second order went through, there was a remaining 250 share 'buy' order #800 share buy order minus 550 share fill.# That order had to be canceled before I could sell my position. #What?!# So apparently, because I had an open buy order I could have shorted the stock that I was currently long, but I couldn't have closed out my position. If you have an explanation for this, I'd like to hear it.
There are some other issues...their commissions aren't that bad, but they charge ecn fees, whether you are adding or subtracting liquidity. I can understand a broker not passing on the rebate for adding liquidity, but charging customers when they're getting a rebate# doesn't quite seem right. Also, from the time I sent in my application, until I actually was able to trade, was about 2 1/2 weeks...they told me it would be 2-3 days. And I had to complain quite a bit during that time just to get that quick of a response. |
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