LeapRate Exclusive… LeapRate has learned that clients of discount US online stockbroker TradeKing were unable to execute buy and sell orders via the company’s website for a while on Thursday morning.
A company representative confirmed to LeapRate that TradeKing’s website was not communicating properly with the company’s order routing system for a few minutes after 11am EST Thursday. While clients were still able to enter orders manually over the phone, LeapRate learned that (not surprisingly) it was near impossible to get through by telephone to TradeKing’s trading floor during that period due to the flood of calls coming in while the website order system was down.
It remains unclear if the downtime at TradeKing was due to today’s wild market action, which saw US equity markets open down about 1.5% after China’s markets were halted earlier in the day. Or, if it was just an unconnected technical glitch.
Readers of LeapRate will recall that in late August a number of US online brokers saw execution problems and outages on a day in which the Dow opened with a 1,000 point drop, before recovering somewhat throughout the day to close down 588 points.
Seen on TradeKing’s website today by a client trying to execute an order at 11:20am EST:
