But the hassles of trying to get that phone connection is not small. The broker has a motley crowd sitting behind him pushing him to punch their orders first. It is no surprise that he keeps you hanging on the phone. You could amuse yourself with all the order shouting from others and other chat that happens near the terminal that is until the time the terminal operator decides to put you on music. and when he really gets to you, he barks at you to be quick. No more leisurely questioning on high and lows so far, the volumes and all that stuff, especially if it is an active trading day. and then of course follows the task of making your trade.

You are lucky if you have an understanding operator, who will give you the scenario in terms of orders, prices and volumes pending to be executed. And even if he was cooperating the crowd physically present in the broker's office will not let him service you all that pleasantly or well. There is no surprise if you thought online investing is the god sent solution. Why not, because, in the personal trading through the broker, you still have the hassle of getting your order execution confirmed, settle transactions physically and in money terms. why not online trading, indeed?

Well, online trading is fine, until you discover the chaos on the mostIntensive trading days in the market
Actually it is on those that days that you need quick access, either to make money or stop losing more money! you discover the pitfalls of online trading only on those frenzied days.

One can learn from the experience in US on online trading.

In October 1997 when the market fell 7 per cent in one day and swung back dramatically the next. Online brokers the number of orders shot up as many as five times the orders on normal days. The huge increase in volume slowed many sites to a crawl. Many frantic customers could not access their accounts and make trades. many lost money because they could not get their orders across or in time. they would not have if they'd continued with their traditional brokerage firm. well, the online firms learnt their lessons. what followed was massive system upgrades; capacity was beefed up and millions of dollars were spent in streamlining facilities to handle peak market activity. capacities in several cases had to be doubled. all this paid of as brokers realised in the peak days in the volatile markets of august and september 1998, when the new york stock exchange saw nine of its ten busiest days on record. the online broking firm raked in trading commissions and ended up setting new trading records daily. therewere some outages though, but not many. but in these days of convergence, online brokers are bound to go the last mile to expand their customer base and will invest even more in equipment. but that does not mean there will not be occassional equipment meltdown or software failures.

With limited bandwidth, one already experiences the message asking you to try later as the line is busy. you will realise that it is better to get across to the broker on the phone on such occassions.

As the number of internet subscribers increase the problem can get acute. and you would be better off if you realise that there are bound to be occasional instances when the web access may go down for short access. It would indeed be bad luck if those periods happen to be the most active and volatile trading times. One way the brokers can minimize the damage to customers is to buy access through multiple, geographically diverse ISPs, but he still needs to caution his clients as to what can be expected reasonably expected of online trading.