Re: GAO report on outages at online trading sites

[jlewis () lewis org]

On 11 Jun 2000, Sean Donelan wrote:

> One interesting statistic was 11 firms reported a total of 88 outages
> between January and September 1999.  About 40 percent of the outages
> lasted for less than 25 minutes, but some firms didn't track any outage
> lasting less than 25 minutes.  So there may be a statistical problem
> with the data.                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

> Even if you normalize for 3/4 of a year, it seems the Internet is actually
> more reliable than the telephone network.  Or, what I suspect is really
> happening, both the telephone industries and the online brokers statistics
> are measuring the wrong stuff.

Something like 80% of all statistics are wrong and 40% are made up? :)

As an Etrade customer, I can tell you I wouldn't buy those stats if you
were paying me to take them.  They have outages far more frequently,
though I just looked at the PDF and they're talking about outages in the
actual trading process.  Etrade's most frequent issue is the portfolio
function not functioning, or in some cases actually malfunctioning.
Friday night, I was trying to view my portfolio and it was down.  I kept
clicking on the portfolio tab, and after a few clicks it came up, but all
the stock prices were off the wall.  My espi had jumped from around 4 to
90-114 depending on which batch of shares you looked at...that's
right...the same stock was reported with multiple different "current
price"'s.

What good is access to online trading if you can't view your portfolio to
see your positions in order to decide what to trade?

But what does any of this have to do with operating a network?  Are you
saying we're next and will eventually have to report all outages to the
man?

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