My E*Trade Experience
I got an E*Trade account a few weeks ago, hoping to buy a stock. As I watched the stock price climb day after day, I waited…and waited…and waited. E*Trade had my money hostage; although the funds were CLEARED and GONE from my checking account, they did not show up at E*Trade. As I discovered, you have to wait five full business days before your transferred funds are available. Shame on me for not understanding the fine print.
So on day four, I decided to open a Scottrade account. I signed on that evening, created the account, transferred some money, and placed the stock purchase order within minutes. The next morning, once the market opened, I had my stock.
It was the NEXT DAY before my money finally showed up on ETrade. So I tried transferring my money out, preparing to close the account. Oops…I received a bizarre “email cannot be confirmed” error. So I called customer support, and they informed me “that’s just a bad error message”. In reality, I have to wait another five days before I can pull my money out.
At long last, about two full weeks after starting down this path, my money is finally out of ETrade. What a joke. A traditional full-service human broker would have been faster, not to mention cheaper, because I could have gotten that stock at the beginning of the week when it was cheaper.
Hopefully this post is useful to someone trying to decide between E*Trade and Scottrade. There is nothing “E” about E*Trade — it is every bit as inefficient as any stodgy old bank.
I’ve had a bunch of stuff in E*Trade for a couple years now and I’ve had mixed experiences. I’ve had some cases of very good and easy electronic exchanges. And I’ve also had some cases of really botched weird transfers, which ultimately required multiple calls to fix. Some of the calls were clearly being handled in an India call center with someone who had no idea what they were doing. And some went great and were extremely helpful. Maybe in the future I’ll check out Scottrade…
I recently had the exact same experience! I’m sorry I didn’t blog about it and warn you. Glad to hear Scottrade is better. I’ll try them next time.
My company stock in held in an E*Trade account. Hope I never have to liquidate it to get out of a Mexican jail. This post brings up a good point about how one’s own experience does more to influence other reader’s buying decisions than millions of dollars spent on advertising. I hope E*Trade gets the point.
Hi
I got burned by E*Trade. Last Nov. I transfered $1000 into my stock investment account with them from my main checking account at wells fargo. A few days later I checked my main wells fargo account too find my account depleted ‘Zero” and over draft had kicked in. This is the account which all my automated bills, including mortage is paid from. I have never bounced a check or triggered an overdraft so this alarmed me. I soon found out that instead of transfering $1000 one time but they had initiated 2 transfers of $1000. I called Etrade and they seemed very understanding, agreed to reverse the second transfer and even reemburse me for the overdraft charge. this was like friday, so on Tuesday I checked online and found nothing had happened. P.S. I am currently unemployed so watching my finances tightly. I then called etrade again and they acted as if I had not talked with them before so I had to explain everything to them again. I then waited till friday and still no change. I called Wells Fargo and explained I had not authorize the second transfer to ETrade at which time they immediately reverse that transaction. On monday I found my funds back in my Wells Fargo account “$1000″ but discovered my ETrade stock investment account no longer available online. I called and recorded the conversation with ETrade.. They informed me they nolonger wanted my business and too get my funds I had too file a noterized letter demanding my funds. I had $10000 in that account and during this time the stock market crashed so could not sell my investments. I also was afraid to do anything with my mutual funds through them because I was afraid they would disappear that account too.
Eventually I was able to transfer my account too Ameritrade which did not invest in subprime mortages. I also filed with the SEC so that ETrade would provide me with my account records. They messed up the records by combining 2 accounts into 1, moved 99,000 shares in and out of the account.
SEC made them send a letter explaining what happened and they explained that they can disappear your account for no reason and this was was in the online customer aggreement.
Personally if customers new they could and would do this they would clearly want to do business else where.
It there is an attorney monitoring this site. I would love to recover the $100000 lost because I could not move my mutual funds during the stockmarket route. Yes I lost roughly $100,000 because I was afraid to do any transaction with ETRADE.
Mark
Docsalvage@cox.net
I had similar experiences with etrade. I tolerated the monthly convoluted statements that were always off a penny or two or a fractional share. My account dropped below a minimum when there was no point in buying and selling and they proceeded to steal $40/quarter. It wiped out all my dividends that I paid taxes on. Then I find out that to transfer my own money out costs $60. I closed the account. It took 3 weeks to reconcile the dozen money market’s my cash was in. The next month I get a statement saying that I owe them $1.07 and they are charging me interest on it. I suspect they are floating our money as it’s moved around.