I had an order placed through Ameritrade today that was routed to the island ECN which took 3 hours to execute! The support people at Ameritrade said it was an ISLD problem. During those 3 hours i couldn't cancel the order either. Is this kind of thing common?
No, not at all. I placed four orders though ISLD today...no problems. But, I don't use Ameritrade...I use a direct access broker.
On June 25, Ameritrade stiffed me on a cover on LEND when I watched the trade price float right through my limit order price. I cancelled the order and figured I'd go 'market' instead only to have my cancel order sit in the 'pending' queue for 8 minutes. When I called Apex support, JUST as the guy put me on hold to go check why it was still pending, it cleared. I was so pissed. I posted about it here: http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19262 I've heard some similar stories about Ameritrade, so I'm dumping them for my day trading activities and going with IB. I've played with their demo interface, and like their commissions. I'll still keep Ameritrade for swing trades, but my day and scalps (and the majority of my money) are going over to IB.
Island had a reported problem this morning. Its not a common occurence. There were about 20 orders that were stuck on my screen BUT it didn't take 3 hrs to resolve. Mine was a matter of minutes.
ISLD actually had intermittant problems throughout the day, yesterday. This is very unusual for them, though. I ended up suspending any ISLD trading and moving my order placement to ARCA instead. Before I suspended using ISLD, however, I had multiple 'stuck' orders on three different occasions. Each time, I called my broker's office (or sent an instant message on MSN messenger) and they immediately called ISLD on the phone to find the order status and cancel the order if still active. While ISLD support was very busy, and my broker had to wait on hold for a few minutes, the orders were resolved within about ten minutes on each occasion. My understanding was that the issue was related to an internet issue (in New Jersey?), and that they were afraid to directly affect the issue during the trading day for fear of shutting down ISLD completely. I assume that it will be completely resolved for trading today. -Eric