Yes, I do need a real broker, though after researching for hours, it has become unclear to me whether there is such a thing. For any lurking ameritrade clients, I will post my continuing saga: It was not a problem with AVG. The next day, it was a little better and I thought it was because I changed to FireFox from IE 7. I also did not place trades using the streamer console. Instead I used the "trade ticket". This kept the data freeze issues to the display of data, and not when i placed a trade. I had only 3 freezes all day. I thought for what ever reason, things might be better. Then today, I froze every 30 minutes, so badly that i could only close out of the browser and log in again to ameritrade, and relaunch the streamer. Every 30 minutes...Also, when there was a lot of data flowing, such as when MNSTR gained rapidly, the MNSTR chart (and the others to a lesser extent), were flashing wildly. This brought the whole thing down to a freeze. Another thing i noticed, when checking what server i was logged into in streamer: I was being cycled through servers, in a single session. (Not when I logged out and in, but while logged in, it read different servers each time I checked it, (every few minutes). I have sent screen captures to my tech support person, of the freezes, and debugger window, (as that was all i could get, before closing the browser). I did not hear back from him after that. Maybe he was out for the day. He has been nice. I do not understand what is going on. If anyone is tech savvy out there, and knows this system, I would look forward to hearing from you. I opened an account at another broker. I have not yet transferred funds. I downloaded their software, but like it less than streamer. I used streamer for a year without issues..... I am a little worried about downloading free software for this type of thing, so did not download the Quote software you suggested, but i appreciate the info. I did read through it, and before it was sold too. It sounds interesting. I like many things about eSignal, though it is pricey. I thought about IB, but it seems so unclear in terms of what my costs would really be, as it seems you have to pay for every detail separately. Also they have no banking services. I would like to just work with streamer, if it worked. But for now, i have a new broker, with software that already shows bugs....I plan to transfer funds mid morning. argh.... Thanks, m_dl
Have they acknowledged that other customers are having the same issues? Have you checked with other customer groups, like on YHOO etc? Not too many people here probably use Ameritrade, so most of us couldn't say whether it is a broker issue, an internet issue or a problem at your end. I will suggest though that unless they are having some major problems, it sounds like you have a connectivity issue. Get your ISP to check and see if you are having packet loss. Run tracert to the broker's IP address. The problem is you need to do it when you are having the outage, since it seems to be an intermittent problem. Good luck, this type of thing can be extremely aggravating.
m_dl, I recently checked but did not notice such Ameritrade data freeze. That does not necessarily mean that you cannot face it. By the way, if you need to have checks and per-trade pricing, you might want to look at just2trade. If you really want, you can easily purchase Esignal type of feed with the amount of money you would be saving by not paying full price in other brokers that also provide checks.
It couldn't hurt to post on the Yahoo message board for AMTD. There are a couple longs there who will shout you down - they claim that anyone who says there's a problem with Streamer is a liar - but if someone has a problem similar to yours they may chime in.