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.

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

whatworks@thestreet.com.

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.