Majority Of Online Brokerages Coped With Investor Rush After Market Closure

by Carla Johnson, Investors Offshore.com

21 September 2001

A study conducted by keynote.com this week has found that despite the rush of investors after the closure of many global markets following last Tuesday's terrorist attacks, most online brokerage sites with only a couple of exceptions performed as usual in terms of the volume of users placing order transactions on the web sites.

Keynote Systems measures transaction performance, the time it takes for an online user to place a stock order, on 14 of the leading online brokerage Web sites and publishes the results weekly as The Keynote Broker Trading Index. The study compared this Monday's figures against those of last Monday, the day before the attacks on America and found that average transaction performance for the sites was down by just over a second from 9.4 seconds to 10.7, and availability fell from 97.9 per cent to 92.2 per cent.

The availability of two sites Datek.com and Webstreet.com, was severely degraded. Datek's availability averaged at 65.9 per cent and Webstreet averaged at 62.0 per cent. Users able to access and place an order on these two sites also found slow transaction performance - Datek averaged at 16.67 seconds, compared to 7.55 seconds the previous Monday, and Webstreet averaged at 18.48 seconds, compared to 10.07 seconds last Monday.

The other sites measured for the most part did as well or almost as well in terms of performance and availability as compared to the previous Monday. Fidelity led the list with 100 per cent availability, followed closely by Firstrade and Merrill Lynch, both with 99.6 per cent availability. CSFBdirect had the best transaction performance, at an average 3.51 seconds.

Mary Lindsay, a Keynote spokesperson, praised the web sites for their ability to cope with the rush, 'most sites apparently were prepared for the high volume that was expected when the markets reopened,' she said.

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