hi, i was selling to close and index option with schwab. i put a limit order in. they popped it out of the system to review for about 2 minutes. in that time i lost about 40 percent. they will not make good on it. id appreciate comments sue
i can look it up but why would it matter, there was nothing unusual about it and they did not contend that there was other than it affected margin and they had to check manually cause ther puters are outdated
The easiest solution if that's happening is to switch brokers... An order to close an open long position should never have to be reviewed.
Schwab should have a policy on how long orders can be delayed for when they kick out for manual review. Call up and argue your case, ask to talk to a supervisor, they may adjust your fill as an accomodation if it is a valid argument. I used to work for a broker and we had a desk that handled a few thousand orders a day that the system could not process. It was too tough and cost too much $$ in manpower for them to change the programming, so the solution was to pay eight clerks full time to man printers and check these orders and punch them in if they were valid; our policy for order re-entry was two minutes. It was dumb, but somebody was happy with the way it worked. Our customers weren't! MOB
I've experienced their manual approval delays on opening orders (when I was above my overnight holding limit but, of course, still below my daytrading buying power limit), up to a minute and a half. The worst was when I put in a market order - it was uncancellable while it was undergoing manual approval. It's odd that they manually approve closing orders, too. Seems like a waste of their (and your) time. When I talked to them about this a couple years ago, one option discussed was to open and account with, and move money to, their Cybertrader division. The rep said that Cybertrader was understaffed compared to them and likely didn't do as much manual review of orders. I decided not to move at the time because Cybertrader charged a high monthly fee for their software unless one did a level of trading that was larger than what I was doing.
i have complained repeatedly all the way up the food chain. their policy is that they can hold it as long as they want cause there is no rule that says they cannot. they clain to aim for no more than 3 minutes or so but i had a market order once that took 9 minutes. a person from schwab told me"we can stick it in our back pocket for a week if we choose" after that i filed for arbitration which is pending.
I would leave the account open while you are in arbitration, and I would also escalate the complaint about the 17K. BUT, you need to immediately switch brokers. Don't give Schwab any more business. You might want to try Interactive Brokers.
No offense. If you could be out of 17K because of an order review at Schwab, then you should not really trade options at all. Hope the arbitration will recover some of your losses, which is doubtful.