Ameritrade is down too many times this year. When your broker is down. What do you do? Close positions by phone? Hedge the positions in another account? Sue them for margin calls, loss etc.
I have Ameritrade too and have the same problem getting in. I can't really complain though, a few days ago I bought lots of AAPL July puts, made a killing and sold them earlier today before the site went down. I actually would like to now buy the July calls on anticipation of an oversold bounce, but can't get in. You have the right idea though. I have another account with Etrade with additional capital there. If something happens on one site and I am stuck in a position and am losing money, my contingency plan is to hedge that position in the other account. Although the stability of my broker is critical, I personally factor in outages as part of the risks of trading. Which is why I have a contingency plan for that, although i've only had to use it once. This is only the second time i've noticed a problem with Ameritrade and iv'e been trading with them for 4 years. At the end of the day though, I have to do whatever it takes to preserve my capital....if that means having a backup broker account, so be it.
Anybody who sticks with brokers that are down too often must rethink their strategy. For me, once is more than enough a reason to bail. It's ll cost you more than the commission you are trying to save.
I once used the ScottTrade Elite platform and it seemed to go down in the morning every other day. Sometimes it was down for a few minutes, sometimes much longer. Needless to say, active traders shouldn't bother with this platform.