I used to have a Scottrade account back in the day and cashed it out before the gigantic market fall a few years back. Since then it went inactive and I closed it.

Not sure why, but I decided to go with ETrade this time as they were doing a promotion for free trades and the balance I wanted tot transfer qualified me for the trades, a bunch of perks and 'free' money. Set up the account, hook my one bank account I use for trading up to it, fund..easy enough.

Not so fast. So even though I did an 'instant transfer' somewhere in the fine print it is now holding it for 3 business days. It's an instant wire, from my bank, which you verified. What the hell do you need this hold for? Oh well, I can deal with this. I wait and on Day 4 I should have the available funds to invest, right?

Not.

Email comes through at 812am saying there is 'unusual activity' on my account and its being locked. This was the first flag; this is total bullshit and after a google search I find out that this isn't uncommon. There are no failed login attempts, everything is only done on my PC which is actually on a secured network; there's no 'unusual activity'. I bet these dumbfucks flagged the account because they finally got around to funding it. That's right, probably 5 mins after it should be funded these faggots lock it because there's some sort of activity on the account. I call the 800# and I get absolutely ZERO answers as to why its locked, but they want to ask me 75 questions about the street I lived on 15 years ago. Answer the dumb questions and wait, whats that.....someone sitting in some office, that doesn't have a phone number and you can only email them the request needs to talk to me to unlock the account? What. The. Fuck?

So some guy 'assigned' to my account, that doesn't have a number, who the supervisor can't get a hold of, who doesn't have a set turnaround time and who I cannot call back if I miss the call has to unlock my account that was locked due to their stupidity in the first place. Almost 5 hours since the first call - no one has tried to contact me.

Are all online invest firms this retarded? I'm already looking to close this one out.


ETA - Oh it gets better. Called them back again to ask why noone has called me back. The reason? The person they assigned my case to, is on vacation. Yes. The person who is assigned to my case, is out on vacation when the case was assigned to him.

ETA 2 - During the same call I wasn't going to hang up until I got an answer as to WTF is going on. Finally, after literally refusing to be passed off or 'called back' they got some sort of message back and now want all sorts of weird ass documentation from me. Again, WHY can;t these people who you are actually communicating with just fucking call me for 3 minutes and figure this out.

I told them to close the account and initially they didn't want to, but they then gave in and did. Money will be back in 2 business days (ironically, faster than they post it).

Add insult to injury, I hung up and called their main customer service line and asked to speak to someone in client retention to discuss this with them and tell them why I am leaving. Don't want anything for free, don't want sympathy, I just want to explain to you what kind of unorganized shitshow made me run, not walk away from you. Oh, they don't have a direct number. If you want to file a 'complaint' you can send a message through your account page and someone will be in contact within 48 hours - doesn't this about sum them up.

There's no such thing as an instant transfer when it comes to banks, you'll always be waiting a couple of days for it to become available, but the rest of that story sounds horrible.  I would be shutting down my account and moving somewhere else.  I played around a little bit with Tradeking and they seemed decent, except they didn't send any tax document until late february/early march.  I don't do any active trading anymore so I only use Vanguard for my IRA.

Yeah I know it's not 'instant' but the other 2 I've used if the account was verified/added to your profile it hit and was available the next business day if done by a certain time. So far here, its taken 6 days and I still don't have access to it regardless of the rest of the stupidity.

That is very common, a brokerage has until the end of Feb to mail your tax documents.  I don't get mine from Fidelity until late Feb.

I have only had positive experiences with E*Trade, have had an account since '97.

Not saying that they are the best, just that my experience has been positive.