-- Subject: E*Trade - A Useful Online Broker Date: Sun, 09 May 1999 21:28:45 GMT From: bobm@melbpc.org.au (Bob Muirhead)I have been using an ETrade share trading account for a few weeks. Here are a few impressions for those interested.
The site is quite well designed for efficient use. ETrade have obviously worked on site responsiveness, and how users prefer to navigate. There are the mandatory graphics, but they are not intrusive and don't slow things down.
Users are rarely more than a click or two away from wanted information, unlike some irritating sites where you have to backtrack and drill down through endless web pages to perform useful tasks.
You can also customise your logon page to show exactly the information you want first up, thus making sessions more efficient.
For any particular share you can get so-called 'live' prices, historical charts, news releases, company information and broker recommendations. There is quite an impressive amount of information.
I particularly like being able to right-click on a news headline to instantly download and save the full article to file for offline reading. The article never hits the screen, saving an awful lot of connection time for a mean bugger like me.
The company news releases are some of the most useful features of the site. Apart from news on specific shares, you can also tap into general business news from a variety of media sources. Unfortunately not Bloomberg or Reuters, the Rolls Royces of data services.
Broker recommendations (buy, sell, hold) for particular stocks come from a service that monitors 8 un-named brokers. You may be able to get the names of the 8 via phone. I have not checked yet. All brokers have their own 'spin' and it would be useful to know who are recommending the buys, sells and holds.
Site response is quite good, even at busy times such as around market opening. I can log on, check a few prices and logoff within about 6 minutes. A session involving getting prices, a few news items and placing an order might take 15 - 20 minutes from logon to logoff. That's with my 14.4 modem via noisy country phone lines.
While prices are 'live' I would never rely on them for important trading decisions where exact prices are essential. Much can happen in active markets between screen updates, which have to be initiated manually at the ETrade site. For normal buying where precise timing is not critical, or for 'At Limit' orders the data is fine.
In major market moves I suspect the whole system will clog up (as will most online trading sites) and users will be unable to get on to execute orders in a timely manner. Then I would forget online brokers in their present embyronic form and rely on my human broker.
Regards Bob
--Happy trails ... Stephen Loosley