What’s Your Opinion on TD Ameritrade?

The following comment was left on the post, “Which Roth IRA is Best for Your Retirement?“
A reader of Investor Trip asked about the quality of TD Ameritrade’s online trading services. He or she seeks a few testimonials on TD Ameritrade’s quality of service and costs. I quoted the exact question from the past post here.
AgentSully said:
anyone have experience with TD Ameritrade? Is their service good? Sometimes with so many mergers and corp changes, it can change their service levels. Just wondering. thx
Since I have zero experience with TD Ameritrade, I’m asking readers who either own an existing account currently or did so in the past to share their opinions on TD Ameritrade.
Before TD Waterhouse and Ameritrade merged, I heard good things about Ameritrade especially, but as AgentSully noted, mergers can really mix things up.
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April 20th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
no, i have no experience with them. However. Suzie Orman endored them at one of here shows to save money.
April 21st, 2007 at 6:46 am
I HAVE HAD LIMITED EXPERIANCE IN STOCK TRADING. I STARTED WITH SCOTRADE. THEN FOUND I COULD NOT MOVE MONEY WITH ACH. MOVED TO E TRADE, ALL VERY GOOD UNTIL THEY STARTED SITTING ON MONEY MOVED BY ACH FOR 5 WORKING DAYS BEFORE IT COULD BE USED FOR TRADING. MOVED TO AMERITRADE. SO FAR THEY HAVE BEEN VERY EASY TO DEAL WITH, AND I WOULD RECOMEND THEM VERY HIGHLY. BUT THE OTHER SHOE COULD FALL.
April 21st, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Moved from a full service broker about 3 months ago and couldn’t be happier. I was unfamiliar with online trading and had some dumb questions for them in the early days that were always handled politely and fully. Only compliant, sometimes the hold time for CS is overly long, 10-20 mins. In fairness, I usually call late at night and they aren’t fully staffed during those times. Trades have cost me less than 10% of what my FS broker was charging and I can place trades 24/7 which is a big plus for me. $9.99 per trade and they may still be offering a 45 day free trading window on some accts.
April 23rd, 2007 at 7:27 pm
I started with Ameritrade many years ago, when Schwab kicked me to the curb for not having a minimum of $25,000 on hand with them.
I now have five TDAmeritrade accounts (non-retirement account, two Roths, two Traditional IRAs).
I love the service, and would recommend it to anyone. I’ve never had a problem with them, and the merger was completely seamless from my standpoint.
April 24th, 2007 at 10:58 am
I’ve been with Ameritrade since 1999 and have no problems with them. I moved part of my portfolio to Interactive Brokers looking for cheaper commissions, but a lot of their services were blocked by my company’s firewall and I didn’t like how it downloaded to Quicken.
I came back to AMTD in full and really like them even more since the TD merger. Great customer service and really good bells and whistles for charting and free analyst reports.
I just read something a week or two ago about izone.com, their discount discount brokerage arm. It’s all on line, not allowed to call anyone for help, but at 1/2 the price for trades. I want to move, but they won’t do a direct rollover of my current three accounts (Brokerage which I blog about and my wife’s and my IRAs).
April 24th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Wow. This is really helpful. Thanks everyone for the detailed information!!
April 24th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Wow. Thanks everyone for the detailed info.
And thanks for posting my question!
April 26th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
I have never use TD Ameritrade trade system. Agent do they support multy contries?
April 27th, 2007 at 7:27 am
I haven’t used TD ameritrade yet. Maybe the other commenters here know.
May 1st, 2007 at 9:13 am
I have found that sogoinvest to be lowest in fees and very good trade times.
May 11th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
I used Ameritrade before the merger and really liked them. It’s been a few years though and now I honestly don’t know if they’re still good or not!
May 14th, 2007 at 7:12 am
Carnival of Personal Finance #100…
Welcome to the Carnival of Personal Finance, C-Note Edition! Yes, this is the one-hundredth Carnival. Think of the hundreds of bloggers who have participated over the past almost two years! The hundreds and thousands of posts! The hundreds and thousa…..
May 15th, 2007 at 5:44 am
[…] TD Ameritrade Online Trading: Good or Bad? - Investor Trip A reader of Investor Trip asked about the quality of TD Ameritrade’s online trading services. He or she seeks a few testimonials on TD Ameritrade’s quality of service and costs. […]
May 30th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
The recent revamp of TD AMeritrade’s website (5/07)leaves me cold…its overpoweriong in its displays, screens and such. They have accuracy problems frequently. And I find it very user unfriendly unless one is a day trader.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:38 pm
I have had absolutely no problems with Amertrade since I opened my account with them in 1997. Before that I was with Quick & Reilly, which i don’t think is even around anymore. I also had an E Trade account, but I’ve been happpy with the service i get with TD Ameritrade, and will probably stay with them unless they really screw up.
June 17th, 2007 at 9:50 am
I am a very active trader with a large Ameritrade account. If you intend to buy and hold for long term I guess they are fine. But their trading systems go out for long periods of time on busy trading days and have cost me many many many thousands of dollars. After this happened again on Friday, June 15 2007, which cost me a couple of thousand dollars, I started looking for another broker. Haven’t decided yet. During the outage, I tried contacting a live broker and was on hold so long the stock I needed to sell incurred greater losses. This is at least the sixth time this has happened to me with this company. Don’t know why I even stayed this long, except that the Devil you know is better than the one you don’t. Needless to say, I do not think they are a good trading platform. Good luck.
June 21st, 2007 at 7:57 pm
I suggest staying away from TD Ameritrade. I recently had a very bad experience with them. I logged on to my account one day - something I do weekly on average - only to find my entire account GONE! Mind you I’m on vacation in Colorado where it’s not the easiest thing in the world to get a phone signal. Anyway, upon calling customer service (after a hold period) I was told that my account was closed due to “inactivity”. Well I suppose they consider monthly moving of funds inactivity. No one could tell me where the cash and investments went or how it would resolve itself. Needless to say, when the bulk of one’s life savings up and disappears at the hands of incompetent financial companies, one becomes quite disturbed. Well, after a couple days of frustrating calls with customer service, the account was “re-instated” with the full assurance that the incident would be investigated and would never happen again. Within a week, they bounced a check and refused my payroll direct deposit putting all my normal living expenses in jeopardy of bouncing - lovely…..Long story short, I have moved every penny from TD to ETrade. Good luck to those who go with TD!
P.S. TD was always good until the merger.
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:01 am
These guys SUCK. I was with waterhouse and Ameritrade when they merged. Now we have 1 ! company tnat truly is uncaring, unfriendly, and unhelpful. Can’t even log in, or even get to the site, off on for 2 days.
September 10th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
No problems w/TD Ameritrade…could always log on and trades are done in seconds. One advantage w/TD Ameritrade compared to Scottrade is that they reinvest dividends for certain stocks like Bank of America and Citigroup at no extra charge. You have to call customer service to see which stocks have dividend reinvestment. With TD Ameritrade, you can also invest in stocks under $1 w/o an extra fee. If you open a new account and I refer you, we can both get $50. Check out my site
http://www.realestateinvestor.com/Jane
September 15th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Cannot stand them. Nothing but mistakes, bad customer service, ineptitude. Stay away. Even though not the cheapest, Fidelity has by far the best customer service. Their trades are 96 cents more than TDAm, but worth every penny to not have to be on hold for 20 minutes in voice mail hell every time they screw something up.
September 29th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
See my story with TDAmeritrade just happened in the last a couple of weeks, I am sure you’ll know what you should do: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/mbtsdk/message/4495
October 1st, 2007 at 9:18 pm
I have very bad experience with TD Ameritrade. I opened my account in April, and provided all required documents to TD. It had no problem until September when I found the ACH was disabled, which means I cannot deposit/withdraw money to/from my account. That’s very bad to me since I need transfer some money to pay my bill. I called the client service, they said I needed to provide some documents that I already submitted when I opened my account. OK, I mailed all documents to them AGAIN but it didn’t work out. Every time I call them or email them, they keep asking me to provide the same documents again and again. It’s almost one month past. I still cannot withdraw money from my account.
October 4th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
Stay away from TDA. Very very poor client service.
GOOD LUCK TD Ameritrade!!!!
January 30th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
RE; TD AMERIRTRADE: Suffered major outage on Jan. 22, 2008 lasting for several hours, then on and off four three days. I was unable to trade as the system failed to accept orders. My total loss for the day was $600.00. That afternoon I tranfered my account to a new broker; Thinkorswim. They have been fantastic so far! TD Ameritrade has nothing but excuses… simply put they are theives!