I will be moving my main account from Sharebuilder to TradeKing in the immediate future. Sharebuilder has not scaled well with what I imagine is a decent increase in customer activity over the past couple weeks. Individual pages have taken up to 20 seconds to load, and the site has given me numerous errors (which costs minutes). Even when I day-trade, I don’t have timing issues where that is critical, but it is extremely annoying. Over the last week, all quotes have been suspect. Again, I could deal with that through other quote services. However, the site is down right now. That’s simply unacceptable. I’ve been a Sharebuilder customer for almost a decade. I’ve been a TradeKing customer for about a year. The response times on TradeKing have never been a problem for me. Their interface for options trading is superior. Their commissions are lower. The only thing I don’t like about them is the lack of a truly immediate free funding capability (they hold funds for 3 days).

If you are thinking of opening a TradeKing account, send me an email nutjob@crazynutjob.com and allow me to refer you. They have a referral program, and I wouldn’t mind making 50 bucks.

If you are thinking about opening a Sharebuilder (ING Direct) account, be certain that you never want to actually trade in real time.

UPDATE

If your website is down and you leave a telephone number for your customers on the replacement page, it’s poor sportsmanship to leave them on hold for 20 minutes.