TradeKing is becoming Zecco for a day. On Friday August 12th, TradeKing will be a commission free trading day. TradeKing is doing this because of the technical problems they had on Tuesday August 9th. For the details, you can read the CEO’s blog post.
I personally was not affected by their outage because I do not trade that often. Here is the E-mail TradeKing sent out to customers:
When we founded TradeKing in 2005, we set a high bar: to do everything in our power to help support our clients’ trading strategies. The past few days of historically unprecedented market volatility have been rough on all of us. We know many of you are uncertain of what comes next and how to react. Frankly, we could all use some extra TLC.
In appreciation of your business, this Friday we’ll be offering a special free trade day for all clients. Any trades placed throughout the day on August 12 will be absolutely free of commissions.
How it works is simple. If you trade on Friday 8/12, you’ll see the commission charged as usual. As of Saturday, 8/13, you’ll still see the trade in your Account Activity page with all commissions waived. (Some fees still apply – see disclaimers below for details.)
Ensuring a satisfied client is always our number one goal at TradeKing. We thank you again for your business – and rest assured that helping our clients is what gets us out of bed every day. As always, if you have any follow-up questions, feel free to contact us at [redacted] or call 877-495-5464. We’re glad to help.
I think it’s great they are giving free trades. It shows they care about their customers and admit their mistake. I’ve had unexplained delayed executions with other discount brokers, and got bupkis for the loss. It would have been nice, though, if they gave out a set amount of free trades, instead of just for one commission free day, say 5 or 10 free trades that could be used at anytime.
I believe this applies to every customer, even new customers that sign up after this outage. In theory, this could mean you sign up using a TradeKing Promotional Code, fund the account, and trade free on Friday.
That’s great that they are doing this. It is important to keep the customer happy since competition is fierce.