I come from the days of Datek. But I have been pretty much dissatified since Ameritrade came into the scene, not to mention the jacked-up commission for less than marginal execution speed. Need I even mention that they cannibalized their own Freetrade, to which I happily belonged for short duration, for Izone (again raising the commission for no apparent improvement in service)? Now that TD Waterhouse & Ameritrade scratching each others' back, I wonder how little a slice of the pie is reserved for traders? Is it time to bail out?
I'm in the same boat. I really liked Datek and now I am with Ameritrade. Ameritrade adopted some of the better Datek stuff but changed the interface. Now are they going to change the interface again?
I think the bottom line is that since Amertrade took over Datek there has been no real improvement. I think this merger signals that Ameritrade's agenda is to get bigger not necessarily better. For the person who is the active trader, there are a lot more choices than when Datek came on the scene. For Ameritrade customers who were on the fence on whether to migrate to another broker, this may move them. It takes a lot of energy to execute a merger, energy which could have been used to address pressing issues.
Speaking of integration, ameritrade still hasn't gotten rid of the old datek interface yet. I have an account with no money and I'm still using datek's old charting when I do my fundamental research. Guess I've gotten used to it.
TD AMTD is nothing more than a marketing organization. They have no real expertise or value added services for anyone with a brain. Their combined daily trades are 230k while IB does 400k.
Same story here. I left almost immediately after Ameritrade bought Datek. Ameritrade brought higher commissions and no improvements so I left and I am glad I did.
Quote from Cdntrader: Their combined daily trade vol is 230k while IB does 400k. IB does over 8 _million_ shares a day just in NYSE program trading.
Yep, I was a Datek user and thought the execution speed was great for a retail firm, when ameritrade bought them, it sucked
TD Waterhouse has a system that it got when it bought RJT. Decent user interface for a Java app and good datafeed. However, it would be highly unlikely for Ameritrade to switch over to that system. I am pretty sure this whole thing is not for technology