If I could jump in... I too have been frustrated by TK. Last Friday an order did not execute through no fault or possible solution of my own, but TK made me whole. I immediately posted that experience for everyone's reference. Today's outage was unacceptable for an online broker. I won't say that I will not keep this experience in mind for a while. TK, your goodwill with the free trades is meaningful, but consider if people had open positions and they couldn't get out of them in a timely manner. If your systems being down affects people with open positions and costing them money, it seems justified for that group to bolt. TK, what would you do if you were a retail client and ran into this situation? $30 in trades only goes this far, please understand that.
Having said that. I am a computer scientist. I know computers break and unforeseen things happen. Despite all the planning and hardware one could do, shit happens. If shit never happened, we don't need computer people like me. To me, what matters is customers who were physically damaged, and then transparency and lessons learned. It seems TK has made a good faith effort to be transparent and to take lessons learned. As far as people with open positions, I don't know the rules, but as I said, they might be justified to take strong action if TK didn't make them whole.
However, let's not get carried away and shed tears for the positions not taken because of the outage. In this market, ten opportunities come and go every minute. I can look at a price chart in hindsight for 100 companies, pick out their high and low, and say, I missed 98 opportunities and I didn't time the other 2 (which I traded) perfectly! That's the market. The market is never short of opportunities. Sometimes, the best trade is the one not made, in fact at least you don't lose cash that way.
I think we as TK clients have a unique opportunity through this forum, through Twitter, to hold TK accountable to the standards we expect and they themselves set. What other companies (please tell the group) is just as or more interactive than TK in such a meaningful way? We clients should continue to hold TK to their standards and our own. However, just because people missed some opportunities today, I wanted to point out, each of us misses most of the buy-bottom sell-top opportunity for every stock everyday, not to mention the minute swings up and down. Not to mention the spreads and countless other opportunities.
In these volatile times, let's keep some perspective. The market with all these opportunities will be there tomorrow. We will all have the opportunity to make our wins and lose our shirts tomorrow.
Alan
