The market dropped another 2% or so today, so when I logged in to my Comsec online brokerage account I got a bit of a shock to see "Margin Call" in big, red letters.
Of course, I knew it couldn't really be a margin call (since I use fairly modest gearing levels, and know how far the market would have to drop to get me close to a margin call). But it's still an uncomfortable feeling to see the message plastered accross your account! When I checked on the listing of my portfolio securities it turned out that all the prices were incorrectly listed as $0.00 per share. Apparently yet another glitch in the Comsec system. A couple of weeks ago the entire system was inaccessible for half an hour during a period of peak demand, causing a lot of investor angst. This really isn't good enough for the largest online, discount broker in Australia.
Copyright Enough Wealth 2007
TDAmeritrade in the US has similar problems and Interactive Brokers often has data outages. So I don't think CommSec is any worse.
ReplyDeleteBeing the largest they probably have least incentive to serve customers.
ReplyDelete