Few years ago I was into trading mutual funds and decided to try 1800 mutuals/mutuals.com. because the liars said they could supply ALL the mutual funds.It turned into a financial disaster for me.They were totally incompetent and because they covered everything with a blizzard of paperwork I suspect they are crooks.
NO, you are incorrect. IB only requires 25% margin for intraday trading of equities. Overnite margin required is 50%.
It has to be etrade or if it is not then no one at the SEC should get a paycheck. Etrade locked me out of my account after I began trading. They then sent me a letter saying my account balance was zero. (But it was 5000) It took me two weeks to finally contact someone there. I am not exaggerating! This really happened. They charged me 25 to transfer my money out and I lost money while my shares fell and I could not sell. After I finally did they went up in value but my money was stuck there for 3 days.
What a fricken nightmare....I will never use ETrade...Thanks for sharing. There last security fiasco lost them a lot of clients especially after someone posted about it here...(I wonder if that guy ever got his money back?)
Funny, I've had 4 accounts at E*Trade for 10 years. No issues and no problems. My active trading account is elsewhere due to commission structure. Of course I have a firewall, anti-virus software and the E*Trade digital security key ID. I take responsibility for protecting my computer. Sorry but if one takes precautions they have nothing to worry about. The digital key ID changes its 6 digit code every 60 seconds. That, coupled with access to ones ID and password is virtually impossible to crack by a hacker. But some of the people bitching about E*Trade and saying money disappeared apparently didn't take certain precautions to protect their PC and their accounts. People gullible to phishing need to take some responsibility themselves. People who don't have a firewall on their PC also bear responsibility. People that flat out don't protect their PC's have responsibility when something bad happens. Do people leave their houses wide open? Doors open so someone can come in and ransack the house? Not people I know. Same security concepts applies to PC's. The guy above who said it took 2 weeks to contact someone must not have tried too hard. I can pick up the phone, call them and get a person .. yeah, sometimes there's a wait time. But I can get someone on the phone the day I call. And he complains about having to pay $25 to transfer his money out. Hello ... he should have read the agreement prior to opening an account. Never mind that $25 is peanuts. And he complains that his shares declined during the transfer process so he "lost money". Anyone who's ever transferred stock out of an account knows the securities can fluctuate (up or down) during the transfer process. And he needs to look at where he was transferring his account to as far as assigning blame to the 3 days. He sounds like a newbie to me.
Sure I am new but I called every day from China for two weeks waiting half an hour a day untill I finally got through after several disconnections. They did not respond to my emails and even the number the SEC gave me did not work. All I got was a recording. It took several calls to organize the transfer and I lost money compared to if I could have just left the funds in the security. If you ever have an issue and you can't get through to them you will know what I am talking about. That doesnt have to do with being new. When their system has problems they do not have enough staff to handle the calls coming in. When I attempted to log on their page said my balance was zero and they sent me a letter saying "fund your account now." As far as the shares declining in value when I couldn't get ahold of etrade and while I was locked out that doesnt have to be with being new either. I paid my price lesson learned.