ScoTTrade

Scotrade statements are not user friendly. They do not tell you how much your account has changed from the first of the month till the end. They only tell you what the value at the end of the month is so you never know from the statements if you lost or made money. The online information is not user friendly as well. You can't customized it to show what you paid for the position and how it has changed on a daily basis. Switching back to TD Ameritrade

1 Star Even though their office is in America, I feel like I am calling India. I don't like all of the extra fees for penny stocks, foriegn stocks and no load mutual funds. Poor service. There are many other online vrokers with lower fees. Only good thing is there is no fee to transfer your account out of Scottrade. Scottrade should stop spending so much on advertising, and improve their lousy service. Scottrade - not recommended.

Placed a market order this am from Elite. They usually execute immediately: this one didn't. It was received and confirmed but not completed. I could not modify or cancel the order. I called Scottrade and was told that there was a "glitch with the New York Stock Exchange," and that the order had been executed but that "we did not have it yet." Meanwhile, I watched in horror as the stock continued to go down, but was unable to do anything about it. (And I found no information to verify that the NYSE had had a "glitch" this morning.) Furthermore, I was told, basically, that that's the risk I take when I trade (in other words, it was my fault). Finally, the order was supposedly cancelled, only to be executed shortly thereafter at the current time and price. I was then able to sell it for a $10 loss + commissions, but that was far better than the $400 I was previously contemplating. The original order was placed at 9:41. It wasn't executed until 10:10. I have also had trouble getting sho... Read more

System is down this morning. Called branch, they can't put in orders either!!!! 8/11/09

You are right on and Scottrade was negligent in allowing you to buy on margin and jerking the rug out from under you with no warning. Whoever rated your comment terrible probably works for Scottrade. Maybe you should call JD power who rates Scottrade number one in customer satisfaction and tell them how Scottrade really treats its customers.

Scottrade has for the second time change, increased their margin requirements, for ETF's. This is after I had already purchased the ETFs and was in a negative position. Raising the margine requirements arbitrarily and capriciously, either requires you to add monies to the account or sell at an inopportune time... This can and does put one in a real squeeze. Not all firms do this, so buyer beware..

On ****/2009 at 8:26am EST I placed an order to buy a stock. I noticed that the Bid/Ask price was fluctuating and the premarket price had moved up enough that I didn't have the funds to cover the trade, so I decided to cancel the order and place a new order when the market opened. Between 9:25 am EST - 9:27 am EST, I tried to cancel my order twice. However each time I tried, the server appeared to hang and I did not recieven any confirmation. At the same time, I was on the phone trying to get to my local branch, because I noticed that the order had been modified from my original order. I had not authorized any change. I was not able to get through to the local branch in the two times that I called. I was finally able to modify my order online and change it to a limit order at 9:28am EST. When the market opened, Scottrade filled my original order, and simply canceled my modification order. Being very confused about the trade, I contacted Scottrade immediately (9:40am EST) to see wh... Read more

Every Friday the scoottrade elite weekly chart only present that Friday's real time open, high, low and close stock prices. This will mislead investor to make a wrong decision. The weekly chart should present that whole week's real time open, high, low and close price. I submit my suggestion a year ago, but they did not do anything.

I signed up with scottrade.com and got 3 free trades with this promo code: HESJ1527 I think they require a $500 minimum to get the free trades. Still a great deal.

Like clockwork, at a very critical point in the day, ALL my quotes are suddenly frozen (for the past 15 minutes) as well as five other friends' quotes around the country. We can't sell for a profit (or take the smallest loss possible now) while the market is blazing on what is a prelude to a major drop starting either today or tomorrow, where the DOW will end up seeing 7000 or lower by year's end. I can't short the three stocks I wanted to at this precise moment which will end up dropping 30 points, 24, points 15 points over the course of the next 30 days, so I can't make any money. Scottrade ALWAYS pulls this crap during KEY market times. And it has nothing to do with an overload of volume or server glitches. I believe they intentionally "kick" the system to freeze so we don't make any money, and so we lose more money. I've traded with and watched how Scottrade operates for 2.5 years, and in my opinion, they exist only to make you fail and lose your money so it goes in their pocket.

Someone from Scottrade must've recently complained to the moderator of this site, because ALL of the 2008 reviews that bashed Scottrade are now gone, including mine, which detailed how Scottrade deceives its customers to steal their money. And isn't it interesting how now a new review appears with a 5-star rating (after no new review had been posted in over a month), and how the only 2008 review to survive out of 25+ is a high-rated one? It would seem someone is trying to give the impression that all of Scottrade's negative elements were pre-2008, which couldn't be farthest from the truth. . It's not ignorance, Robotech. What I and several other people had outlined are facts that Scottrade does not tell you about and it's not in their literature, and there's no way of knowing something is going to harm your stock position until AFTER the fact. That's why I'm suing Scottrade.

Do you even know how bad things are at E-Trade? Holy cow, they are begging for money from the government, your own tax dollars, to save their own failing company with its bad business practices and shoddy management. Think I'm kidding? Take a look at the news such as here:   http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/industries /finance/e-trade-seeking--mln-treasury-capital-program/ $800 million of our tax dollars hard at work! Man they sure like to privatize earnings but they want to have the government subsidize losses! Better watch any money you have with them! Scottrade may not be to your liking but they are so much better than many of the others out there.  It's funny on sites like this because people come in one time when they are made and often ill-informed and just vent and never come back again.  Look at the reviews on other sites as well.  All it is is people moaning about something in any company and most of the time it is their own ignorance of the situation that just make... Read more

Watch out for Scottrade tricks that they don't tell you about. I bought 2000 shares of a stock for $15.00, then it dropped to $13.00 the following session. I bought another 1000 at $13.00 and had to call Scottrade to place a versus purchase order to sell my $13.00 shares for $14.00 (unlike E-trade, Scottrade doesn't allow you to reverse the order yourself). It's not in any of Scottrade's literature and they never informed me that if I modify the reverse order I placed through them that it reverts back to "first in, first out." So what happened was, I changed my $13.00 shares to sell for $13.75 instead of $14.00, via my online trading page through Scottrade, and instead of making a profit of .75 per share I unknowingly took a loss of $1.25 per share because 1000 of my $15.00 shares were sold instead. I didn't realize what had happened until I looked at Gainskeeper one day and saw my loss was not as great anymore. I called them up and asked what happened, then they explained it to me. Ju... Read more

I started trading about a month ago with scottrade and I love their research tools, and streaming quotes, but I have some problems 1.you can not short stocks below $5.00 2.Your trades could take several hours to a whole day to execute. 3.you get charged more than the advertised 7 dollars for penny stocks. but other than those problems it's alright, I think I will try thinkorswim next.

To go with the bottom poster here is what else can't be done. Set a prospective sell price beforehand that's too far away from the current price.. I was going on vacation for a month and wouldn't have access to a computer, so I would be unable to trade. Before leaving I tried to set a sell limit of 1.60 on a stock I bought at .55. I was fairly sure it would go up. Scottrade would not permit me to set it that high, so I had to set it at .95. While on vacation, the stock went to 2.80+, but my sell limit hit at .95, making me miss all that profit. The jerks clearly don't want anyone to make any money, so they create crazy rules. There is definitely something shadey about this company.

I ownd a penny stock at (10,000 @ .23) and one morning in pre-market it was trading at .79 on good volume off a PR. Scottrade would NOT allow me to sell for a profit, stating the price was too far away from the last market price. Duh!!!! That's the whole point of investing...to have the stock go UP so I can make some money. All I could do was sit there and watch.  It opened .40 in regular trading and then dropped back to my buy-in price and is now below .10.  I hate Scottrade! I hate everything about them. It isn't until I try to do certain things that I realize how useless they are. I'm going to try e-trade. And I agree about all the technical issues. During key market times, such as today, things just don't work. For instance, toward the closing yesterday and now this morning, my DOW chart will not stream in real-time, but just stays frozen on the screen. The stock charts stream fine, but DOw, S&P; and NAS just sit there, preventing chartists like me from seeing a potential bott... Read more

Scottrade sucks...try thinkorswim

Scottrade should be investigated by the SEC for their continuos on line technical issues. Their nationwide system was down for an extended period of time last week. They were not answering their telephones locally or nationwide. This is costing customers millions of dollars in this turbulent trading environment. Has there been any discussion about a class action lawsuit?

Scottrade simply sucks!!! My Scottrade Elite program had to reconnect to their servers several times during high volume hours. So far these type of problems has caused my sell orders not able to go through. According to the logs, Scottrade Elite couldn't get to the server and so had to reconnect itself. By the time it reconnected to a different server it had already costed me to lost several hundred dollars, sometimes even thousands of dollars! I know for sure the problem isn't at my end. I've got business class FIOS at home and running on a dual cores 2.8GHz machine with 2GB RAM. I am definitely switching out of Scottrade, because their server delay problems already costed me more than $10,000 instead of making money on each of those 'connect lost trade orders'!!!

Website seems to ALWAYS be down pre-market on big news days. I log into my account about once a week, and just the first half of this year, I've caught Scottrade's website down 5 times. 3 of those times it was down well into market open. I don't understand how they could have such a blase' attitude about keeping their website running. They are cheap, however they're not the only low cost brokerage in town anymore.

Amateur website. Like one of the reviewers stated, Scottrade delays cancelled orders. I put in an order, cancelled it. It even told me it was cancelled, no funds were taken out of my account. The same day, I place another order for the same stock, but at a lower price. I find out the next day that BOTH orders were placed, even though the 1st one was cancelled. I call their customer service and got someone who could barely speak English and told her what happened. All she could say was "well, you placed 2 order". Other things I hate about their site is it lags now and then, their "profit" tracking is stupid and doesn't reflect losses or profits whatsoever, I mean, what's the point in even having that? The reason I chose them was because of the low commission. You get what you pay for. Scottrade.... whoever this "Scott" guy is, he needs a lot of improving to do. Ridiculous.

Terrible...I am so disappointed that I make sure everyone I know, knows that Scottrade has no respect for their clients whatsover...Lack communication...the quality of customer service is -10..not sure how this company claims one of the best...if you want to more my disappointing experiance feel free to email me...I will be glad to give you details...just stay away from Scottrade...

They suck, I just pull all of my money out yesturday during the 2nd day of login problems, server errors, lagged trades, and overall an archaic interface that screams ATARI. They have consistently had misinformation or outdated information representing my positions, cash, margin, etc. They cost me a nice $5000 on tuesday on a EJ trade that was easy money. Maybe they should spend less on helicopter commercials and more on servers from this millenia and programmers who can code with more than java. I hope that helicopter crashes and kills that annoying smug prick in the commercials.

I dumped them this morning after excessive lag on executions. 4-6 minutes on 4 stocks cost me 900+ account lost 27.00. Tech said "what do you want me to do about it" Cust service is great but the elite gets quirky at times and lost me thousands... time to move.

This morning pre-hours trading is off and scottrade does not answer any of their phone numbers. I have consistant problems with scottrade being down and tech and local office support is non-existent during down times. I am changing brokers -besides they are not a stock company so you never have an truely audited look at their financials, so I don't know how safe it is to have your money with a company that does not report quarterly financials.

This is for all the whiners out there. Boo hoo. Think you can do better? why not start your own brokerage firm, oh your all morons. So they have some issues, every brokerage firm does. Have you seen the news of ameritrade and etrade being hacked with the pump and dump schemes? Oh wait the only "big" firm not effected by this was Scottrade. As for all you Elite users who disconnect all the time, open up port 443 on your routers and firewalls a simple call to tech support would of told you that. Scottrade is constantly upgrading and providing the services (free) that clients are asking for. You think this happens by a magic programming genie? As of now, I have read all your comments below and most of them are obsolete as most of the issues have been resolved. As for the customer service, the best I have encountered, all the people who say they are bad, could it possibly be because of YOUR tone or what you were saying? Hrmm some poor young representative is answering calls allllll day and... Read more

There are problems with averaging prices incorrectly on scottrade. I am considering changing brokers. When you call tech support they DO NOT keep a log of transactions-- so you start from square zero every time. They do not even have a record of who you spoke with. That said, the tech support guys are nice and helpful people. I like the scottrade staff, it just seems they are not being backed up. How about less time in that helicopter on TV, and more time working on keeping your customers satisfied?

I am not very active trader, and Scottrade fills my need properly. I am using it for three years with no single problem so far. I think, it is the best solution for the beginners - investors.

Be careful with what you see on Scottrade's average price. On Dec 26 I bought EWZ x 1500 shares. The average price $82.2113. (300 x 82.00, 700 x 82.31, 500 x 82.20) Scottrade "Elite" show an average price MUCH lower. I got suspicious and after phoning their office, got confirmation that the shown average price paid is wrong. This one time I confirmed my position over the phone but God knows how many transactions I have sold at a loss thinking I am making a profit! Does anybody else have the same problem with Scottrade and their average prices? [email protected]

WOW. I was buying RIMM Pre-market and put a bid in for 122. It did NOT show that I had bought this at that price, so 2 minutes later, I cancelled my order. Here's the SCOTTRADE problem ( although I do like them, this just happend) 1. for the whole trading period, my balance was full, it showed that I had cancelled this order, and i was able to trade all day up to my maximum margin . 2. half hour before closing, my pre order showed up almost 8 hours into the trading day, at the current price of premarket 122. and now RIM is at 118. ( and I have 400 shares) so quite a lost. I called them, and they had the software glitch, and had to file each order by hand. 3. if i knew I had bought it early in the day, i could have sold it early, knew about it, and saved lost money. but it just APPEARED and I was TOLD that orders TECHNICALLY have up to 3 days to fill. but in the 'REAL WORLD' it is almost immediate, except for those GLITCH DAYS at scottrade. Wow, each glitch cost a th... Read more

Using Scottrade is the best way to lose money on an otherwise winning position. Their system is down a lot, very unstabel. Fill confirmations are delayed, sometiems for hours. Changing the buy/sell order is somtimes impossible. Their favorit line "there was in issue with your order" Just like it happened this morning during Pre-market trading. They decided to shut the trading down, and do a update in the system. I was trying to load off my RIMM position pre-martket. Prices went all the wa y up to 124.40 pre-market but I could not do a thing. Scottrade screwed everybody, and I am sick of their stuff. This little incident with RIMM cost almost 7 points, as the stock sold off after the market opened. The Elite platform, the Total view is the worst. There has to be a better broker out there. Any opinion?

Yesterday the whole Scottrade trading system was down the first 1 1/2 hours of trading. I watched helplessly on a very volatile day as my stocks went from up 1% in the green to down 2% in the red, and I was helpless to get out. I couldn't get through on the phone, there was no way to make a trade. I estimate I lost $1000 due to the problem. I am going to re-evaluate the lower trading fees against the other costs associated with this terrible service. I would rather pay another doller or two per trade than go through that again.

I started with scottrade back is 2003 when they were the only broker that didn't have a monthly inactivity fee. I just want to be able to buy long term investments and maybe a few speculative ones. Monday I needed to withdraw about 10% cash from my investments and now it is Friday and I still down have my money. Apparently it can take a week to get my own money unless I want to PAY to get it wired sooner. I have accounts with E-trade and Emigrant direct and have no problem doing an electronic transfer. Is Scottrade still stuck in the 20th century? Their staff is totally useless and unwilling to help - "These are the rules - take it or leave it". Next week I'm closing my account.

Scottrade never calls to tell you they are making a significant change to your account. They just do it and tell you this is the way we do things when you call them about the change.

I have used them for many years, and I like their streamer and website. They have many good features (streamer, live charts, news etc) which are not as sophisticated as direct access brokers, but you don't need much to be successful at short-term trading. The marketmovers feature is very useful for daytrading if you use it properly. My gripe with them is that I occasionally find errors in my account history and the Gainskeeper. They were rude about it when I questioned it. Now I will have to closely check balances (a real headache for active traders) to be sure I'm not be shafted. Also the latest version of Firefox causes their site to lock up. No problems with any other website. Sometimes the wrong order is entered when I am closing a position, and I have been short twice the amount of stock without knowing it. So I suspect a problem with their Java or other questionable activity. Unfortunately I do not know of another broker with the features I want: low cost, Streamer and li... Read more

Scottrade? Give it a Pass. I began using Scottrade about a year ago. At first, there were no real problems. Unfortunately, I was dumb and placed too much money into my account for trading. Trading long was never a problem and I entered and exited the market fairly frequently. However, when the market seemed to be headed down I began shorting stocks and that's when Scottrade turned nasty. I shorted about a thousand shares of a well trade company in June. Now this is a firm that routinely trades well over a million shares per day--so it isn't thinly traded. The stock price has slowly and steadily declined and it looks like the company hasn't hit bottom yet. However, I am no longer short this particular company. Why? Because Scottrade says it can "no longer borrow the stock" for my short sale. Understand this is not a margin call situation--the stock went down as I figured it would. But Scottrade has bought back my position incrementally over two weeks. The first "buy back" was for... Read more

I've used Scottrade for 8 months now. While it was great when I started in late 2006, I find that now I CANNOT log onto the site during off hours (weekend, right before trading begins, right after trading ends). Labor Day weekend now and I couldn't log into my account for 2 full days. I'm not a day trader and I live in Japan which basically means these are the only times I can log into the account. While I understand server problems and updates occasionally causing downtime, this is ridiculous. If it were not such a pain to move to another broker, then I would do so immediately. As it is, I'll have to give them some time until it truly becomes unbearable for me, then move.

1) The standard software is mickey mouse. The charting and detailed analysis capabilities are a joke and there is no way to track expenses. I still have to use MSN's portfolio manager to analyze investments. 2) Trades take FOREVER. It typically takes 7-8 business days to sell and then complete the purchase of a new investment. 3) While stock trades are $7, mutual funds are $17. Otherwise, they have local offices, the service has been fine, and I have not had any accuracy problems to-date.

I inherited about $100,000 in stock - first time I have owned stock. I took the first certificate I received to Scottrade since they have a walk in office and I wouldn't be sending endorsed certificates in the mail. I take the certificate and endorse the back and was told my who I later found out was an intern that I would see the stock in my account in 5 business days. Since I have found out I should have been told 1 day. After 10 days, I call to say the stock doesn't show up. After promises that someone would get with me within an hour and noone did, I finally threatened to file a police report for theft against them. Someone calls me back and 2 days later calls to tell me the stock was lost in their St. Louis office. They send me paperwork to have the stock replaced and agree to let me trade it once they receive the paperwork, but they send that by US Mail not express mail. So meanwhile, the market is hitting record highs while I'm sitting around waiting on them to quit monkeying ar... Read more

My problems with scottrade are not unique. Last year (2006), I could count on their server going down a couple times a week. I always reported the problems, only to learn that everybody else was having the same problems. Most of the time the outages didn't last long, a few minutes, but sometimes they could last for more than an hour. If you're a serious day trader, that is a real problem. This year the overall system is much more reliable, though I still see some problems sometimes. The biggest problem is the live news feeds. Sometimes those would go down several times a week, a real problem if you depend on the latest news. I haven't seen that problem however for couple weeks. I am writing this note tonight because there server is off line again. It is not a huge problem after market hours, but I still can't get at my account information so I am not happy. I agree with the guy who says "you get what you pay for". Of course this is one of the lowest cost brokerages out... Read more

I just started my real trade with scottrade 2 months ago,and i got several problems: 1. Transferring money from the same account into scottrade can not go through the second time, I called them and they said it is my account problem. But in fact 1 weeks later the transaction is completed, however the status is still in progress, and they locked my transferring account, horrible! I called them 3 times, and it still not resolved. 2. Order lost! I submitted an order in later feb, and my buying order did not go through even the stock price is far lower than my order. I called them, they said the back end trading system error! 3. Selling Trailing order disappear! I set a trailing selling order to try their service, but it disappered in the premarket. And their system shows the wrong ticker for my stock! and Warning me that I have an margin call, and my cash summary become incorrect, $3000 more is gone!!!! I callled them, and the line is always busy... Shame on them! I sold my stock to... Read more

Scottrade gets worse by the day. Scottrade Elite and regular website trading down for hours at a time and all they can say is sorry, we're working on it. Not for the serious trader.

9/30/06--I have spent the last few weeks, doing nothing but extensive online research, since I have become interested in investing online as a complete newbie. First of all, I advise you to google this phrase: "online broker ratings" if you are looking for an online broker. MSN Money has a great article that reviews different types of brokers, as do many other consumer websites! My conclusion from this experience is that hands-down, everyone says that Fidelity is the 'cadillac' of online brokers. You will pay more for their services at $19.95 per trade, which includes stop and limit orders, but you will have the comfort of knowing that you're working with a business that is sound and has real reputation for excellence in this industry. Plus, they have 24/7 customer service,which I love to see in any banking service, and research tools. After narrowing down my prospects to Fidelity, E-trade, and Schwab. I called Fidelity at lunch hour during a workweek, and waited no more than a minute... Read more

I started using Scottrade within the past month and am very satisfied. Their website is easy to negotiate while being informative. In fact, this week they redid the homepage. I have had no problems whatsoever. They have a branch office 10 minutes from my home, which is very convenient. All my phone calls were answered within a couple of rings and I received the information I needed (I always have called my local branch). I am not what you might call an "active trader" - I do not use "Elite". I do not buy margins or options so for me Scottrade is great (and their fees are excellent).

Scottrade has been having great problems with their servers for over a year now. Their technical support is pathetic. When their systems are down, if we try to reach the live brokers, it takes more than 20 minutes. By that time, the trades we would want to place would be out of hand. Their local office staff in San Jose, is completely incompetent. Scottrade Elite is a big mess and is never stable. It keeps refreshing the connection while blacking out the data. While all these are happening, they keep trumpeting about some stupid awards given by some incompetent judges at JD Power. Either that or they are bribed to give such awards. Scottrade is in denial. I am frustrated with their Elite connectivity, Technical Support staff, Staff at local San Jose office, Live brokers being unavaible during their system outages on and on... This has been happening for over a year now. I have another joint account with Ameritrade and it is really great. I rarely have an issue. I am thin... Read more

I am moving my accounts even though it is a lot of trouble. I have major problems with the elite everyday and calling them does no good because the program itself stinks. Today it is not running at all. I have lost most of my symbol lists. I have had to keep backups of the data file because I know that every day I will have to restore it. My advise find some one else if you need a streamer. I would like to hear about someone who has had success somewhere else because I am looking right now.

Doesnt Sell at the Market Price Sells at the BID.They have cost me $$$$$ More than once.I Dumped them.

Scottrade was great for me when I was in the buy/hold mode. Recently I have become a more active trader again. I use the Elite platform with Total View. Over the past 2 months the "stuck" level 2 tiers, time of sales window having to be expanded vertically to almost the full height of my monitor screen in order to view the latest trade data, premarket trading unavailable, extended session market trading unavailable, intraday breakdowns with executions, confirmations, order cancellations, order modify's etc all being delayed or unavailable for sometimes hours. In short, the platform is so unstable that I am afraid to use it now. Yesterday (2-2-06) was the final straw. Repeated server outages prevented any action with certainty. When it finally seemed to be up and running again I bought one of the hot China plays just before market close for this morning gap up. Well, I could get no confirmation I got filled until this morning. In other words it didn't show in my positions until this mor... Read more

I've been using Scottrade for about 5 years now and have experienced very little problems with them. I am not a heavy trader, and their convenient access and low price per trade has helped me earn an amount over the years that I am happy with.