What Works Mailbag: New Broker Fees, Lowered Minimums and Unsubscribe Watch

Today I look at some new broker fees, lowered minimum investments, a broker customer service survey and "unsubscribe watch."

New Fees for Confirmations

Here's a change that's annoying but perhaps inevitable. Terra Nova Trading, the Chicago-based direct-access broker, now charges customers to have official trade confirms snail mailed to them. Quick & Reilly is planning to do the same, possibly as soon as the next couple of weeks.

The change is annoying, because a written trade confirm is something many investors likely take for granted. But it's probably inevitable, because all aspects of our financial lives are increasingly becoming paper-free, from taxes to banking and 401(k)s to investing.

Also in This Column

Streaming Quotes'll Cost Ya' On a Good $$ Note Customer Service Survey Unsubscribe Watch

Currently, most of the bigger full service discounters do not charge for official written confirms. (By official, I mean not the instant email you might receive after a trade is executed, but the document regulators require with details like commissions and fees and legalese.)

At Fidelity, customers can opt to access their confirms electronically and forego snail mail copies, but there's no charge either way. Same at Datek, which says that about 40% of its transactions are now confirmed electronically. At TD Waterhouse, written confirms are standard, no charge; electronic versions are not currently available.

A charge for mailed confirms is not something I'd switch brokers over. Just know your firm's policy to avoid surprises. Here are some examples:

Terra Nova Trading: $3 for mailed confirms for all trades on a given day, no matter how many; electronic confirms free

Wall Street Access: $1.50 "postage and handling" fee on all written confirms; no electronic confirms

Mr. Stock: $1 for mailed confirms; electronic confirms free

Quick & Reilly: plans to charge 50 cents for mailed confirms; electronic confirms free

Streaming Quotes'll Cost Ya

As anticipated, Silicon Investor begins charging for its streaming quote service, $9.99 per month, as of April 1. SI was the last online service I know of to offer streaming quotes free of charge.

If you are in the market for a streaming quote service, check out this series by my colleague, Mark Ingebretsen. Mark discusses Money.net, the tool offered by Silicon Investor.

On a Good $$ Note

Schwabbies who have faced $10,000 minimum investments on trades of certain foreign stocks will now have to put up only half that amount, $5,000. Steven Chandler, veep of global trading at Schwab, reports that the firm recently renegotiated its minimums on purchases conducted through a local overseas broker (in contrast to situations where a U.S. market maker has shares in its inventory). I've liked Schwab for foreign stock investors from the get-go, and this change only makes it better.

Customer Service Survey

With all the staff reductions at online brokers lately (including Ameritrade, Schwab, CSFBdirect and TD Waterhouse), investors have to wonder how staffing will impact customer service. Then again, with lower trading volume there's probably less demand for customer service. Pacific Crest Securities, a Portland, Ore., firm that focuses on Internet companies, recently conducted its own survey of how well brokers service their customers. It looked at the average call wait time to speak to a service rep, email response time and knowledge of customer service reps.

Scottrade took the prize as most responsive time-wise, while Ameritrade, Schwab and CSFBdirect scored on having knowledgeable reps. No surprise to see E*Trade and Datek toward the bottom -- they haven't performed well in this category in past TSC surveys either.

What was strange was seeing Fidelity in last place. While the firm's consistently been No. 1 in TSC's rankings for service, Pacific found its performance lame for call wait time, only average on rep knowledge, and horrific for email response time: 20 hours, 53 minutes (the average for two emails sent).

Comments? Email your customer service woes to [e-mail].

Customer Service Survey Rankings
Company Name	Overall Rank	Average Call Wait Time	E-Mail Response Time	Customer Service Knowledge
Scottrade	1	0 sec	11 min	Above Average
Ameritrade	2	40 sec	28 min	Excellent
Schwab	3	15 sec	7 hr 12 min	Excellent
CSFBDirect	4	28 sec	None	Excellent
Quick & Reilly	5	39 sec	1 hr 4 min	Above Average
TD Waterhouse	6	34 sec	53 min	Average
Web Street	7	41 sec	35 min	Average
E*Trade	8	1 min 13 sec	11 hr 22 min	Above Average
Datek Online	9	2 min 50 sec	5 hr 5 min	Above Average
Fidelity	10	1 min 15 sec	20 hr 53 min	Average
Source: Pacific Crest Securities Survey

Unsubscribe Watch

In response to my call for email newsletters that made it difficult to unsubscribe, readers sent several candidates -- thanks. I'm trying to replicate the situations myself. So far, I've hit two glitches/annoyances, one with Grant's Investor and the other with Blue Dolphin, a site that produces all sorts of financial and other newsletters. After I subscribed to Grant's and received the newsletter, I hit the "unsubscribe" link and got this message: "There was an error displaying this link." How convenient for them!

A couple of days later I went back, clicked, and did get a page where I had to log in to unsubscribe. I don't like the "log-in" requirement, because folks forget their passwords, but it did work.

Blue Dolphin made unsubscribing easy enough, but they're a little sneaky about it. The unsubscribe page lists two new offers with "subscribe" buttons selected. If you were to quickly "accept changes" to the page, you'd end up subscribing to new products in the process.

Reader Kevin Lynch hit home when he reported problems unsubscribing to the email of TSC's subscription site, RealMoney.com. TSC's director of customer service Bernadette Sweeney says that for about two weeks the unsubscribe link in the RealMoney daily bulletin led to a page that did not work, but that it's since been fixed.

Finally, reader Melinda Harper points out that email program Microsoft Outlook has a "junk" email feature that blocks messages from unwanted addresses. Most other e-mail programs have similar features.