Steven Loi - My thoughts, stories, and experiences.

I’m a novice investor, being self taught with the exception of one elementary financial training internship at the Morgan Stanley in Sacramento, I rely a lot on the web to provide the data I need to do my analysis for my portfolio. Through my time, I’ve invested in learning about fundamental analysis, P/G ratio, earning multiples, cyclical and secular stocks, comparative analysis, key metric, yields, etc.

I’ve learned what it’s like to invest in stocks through simulated stock market competitions. From there, I then took the next big step — I took some money and invested in a portfolio for myself, testing my strategies and analysis. Since seven months ago, I started monitoring both my trading account and my sister’s Roth IRA account. She asked me to be in charge of her account to better my investment knowledge. We both have our accounts with Scottrade — seemingly a popular choice among small amount investors.

As with most people, I was attracted to Scottrade’s low fees ($7 a trade for both market and limit orders and $7 + $1.25 per contract for Option orders) and it’s stated reliability and satisfaction. And so far, Scottrade has delivered on the reasons why I opened my account with them:

1 - Low fees;
2 - Reliable platform (I don’t get too many down times); or,
3 - Gets me some basic information.

However, only after being an account holder with them for six months did I find some useful, albeit hidden, tools within their research section of the site. Primarily, I usually find myself on Yahoo! Finance, Google Finance, or even TheStreet.com to get the necessary information I need. Even with those sites, there are some limitations (delayed stock tickers for one). However, it still does a good job. It gets me more relevant information faster and with less hassle than Scottrade can.

With that said, I still like liked Scottrade. It did it’s job. The aforementioned sites compliments Scottrade as it gives me the data I need more efficiently (got to love the web) and Firefox does a great job in allowing me to navigate from tab to tab without much hassle (great for viewing multiple stocks). Well, I liked until… a week and a half.

As I mentioned above, during market hours, from time to time, I monitor both my portfolio and my sister’s. It’s a bit of a hassle since I have only one browser (Firefox). So typically, I log into one and I’ll log out to check the other account. On this particular day, the bears were all over the market bringing many stock prices down and I had some cash on hand that I wanted to invest in a company that had just fallen to my price point. I hurried and logged out of my sister’s account and into mine. You see, she specifically too me some of her constraints she wanted me to work with for her portfolio. I was fine with that as every person should have their own level of risk that they would want to take.

So I get back into my account and I place my order — Trade > Buy/Sell > Shares > Symbol > Order Type > Duration. So I go through that routine. Place order… confirm. “Bam! Got my shares at the price I want!” I said to myself. Only if it were that simple — so to my surprise, it got purchased alright… to my sister’s account! “How could that be?!” I said to myself…

And with a little digging around and then bouncing the problem off the programmers in the office, problem found: Scottrade account login process stores the account information into cookies. because of this, as it happened with me, even though I clicked to log out, it may still recognize the stored cookie on the computer and redirecting me back into that account. I find this a big security glitch. For a big company like Scottrade where many users use their system, they cannot afford such a glitch. Nonetheless, I didn’t let it bother me too much.

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Later that day I decided to be a good customer and called into their customer service number. When I got a hold of the technical support, I explained to him my problem and mentioned specifically want the problem was. His answer?

Rep #1: “Oh, we know it does that. What you have to do is to go into your internet browser settings and delete the cookies.”
Me: “Are you serious? Do you think the average person will know how to do this?”
Rep #1: “Well, that’s what you have to do.”
Me: “Well, that’s fine with me. Like I said, I’m okay with the situation. I just wanted to bring it to your guys’ attention. Out of curiosity, are you looking into fixing the problem because that could be a pretty big issue.”
Rep #1: “Oh…[pause] yeah, the guys are working on it.”

I didn’t get any sense of genuineness from the representative that they are indeed working on it. I was shocked and disappointed. But, hopefully my story will prevent this situation from harming other investors as well.

It’s unfortunate that Scottrade treated me like that. In a business where their 100% on their reliability in their platform/security and their customer service, Scottrade failed at both.

And for the readers here, one more question: Why is it that most people do their stock/market research on a separate site than the one they actually trade on?