After a 1,000-point drop on the Dow in a matter of 15 minutes Thursday afternoon, reports surfaced that individual investors had difficulty logging on to their online brokerage firms' websites to conduct trades. With the market going through the biggest intraday point drop in history, some speculated that certain sites may have crashed because of high trading volume.
I talked with spokespersons from the major online brokers, none of whom said their websites experienced outages during yesterday's tumultuous trading session. Here's what they had to say:
Charles Schwab
TD AMERITRADE
Fidelity: Fidelity saw near-record peak brokerage transaction volumes on Thursday, according to spokesperson Vin Loporchio. The broker continued to serve customers, with some intermittent slowness for short periods, but without interruption throughout the day. "Customers were able to trade on and use the site throughout the day," he said. "Some trades that customers submitted during the day were executed, but may not have been immediately visible to customers."
Scottrade and E*TRADE Financial
Did you experience any difficulties in accessing your online broker to trade? Weigh in below!