[ale] waaaaaay... [OT]

[abarton at mindspring.com (Alexander Barton)]

Hogg, Russell E wrote:
> 
> Anyone care to comment on who they use for online investing?
> And just as importantly, why?

I used E*Trade for a bit a while back.  They charged $20 per trade. 
They took away their "simpler" web interface in favor of bloated 
graphics-intensive flashy ick....  (Dammit, I want to trade, not to be 
entertained.)  They put advertisements everywhere.  (Dammit, I'm paying 
to let me do trades, I don't want my eyeballs sold to the highest 
bidder.)  Then I started receiving spam from third parties on behalf of 
E*Trade.  (This was back in the good old days when my mailbox wasn't 
flooded with spam, and, for the few weekly spams I got, I could look at 
the messages and hunt the spammers down and complain to their ISPs.  Now 
with 200+ spams a day, I'm using automatic filters and don't know who's 
spamming me now.  Okay, end of rant.)  I think it was the spam that 
finally got me angry enough to give E*Trade the boot.

So, I switched to Datek (now Ameritrade).  $10 per trade.  No banner 
ads. No clue if Ameritrade is spamming.  I have no complaints.

-Alexander