I'm curious as to why APEX just sent me a letter, giving terms as to how secure my accounts and data were. I have no accounts outside of Interactive Brokers -- a DMA, remember. Now, back ~2006, I went from ETrade to OptionsExpress and a 401k sent over to upstart TradeKing. My suspicions are that • my personal data are not so secure as APEX would have me believe, and that • one of ETrade, OptionsExpress, or TradeKing are still keeping my account number/data active, despite expressed statements to the contrary. Oh! and • that some materially-sized subset of ET members has received a similar letter -- whether for live or dead accounts. Any help? Who was your introducing broker to APEX?
I have an account with every one of those places and I haven't seen a letter from APEX yet. I didn't have any special introduction to APEX though.
Well, none of those brokers clear their own trades, so your stuff is going *somewhere*..... (Come to think of it, are they each still *around*??? Have they all been absorbed by someone else? I dunno..... even more scary, perhaps...)
I actually should close those accounts down. IB and I just went steady so I don't know if there's any utility is keeping the others.
If there's data questions, if there's graphing glitches, if there's fundamentals research for equities to do, *sometimes* it's nice to have an alternative. Redundancy in trading resources is a good thing, and sometimes an alternate platform can fill that bill. But I went index options for a multi-year stay, and never made use of an alternate account. (Of much better use was a friend who also traded via IB -- we had a couple of 3-way and 4-way conversations (chicago and Connecticut) that solved some fair-sized mysteries.) FWIW and all that... If they don't charge you (inactivity fees), keep 'em around for a year...
oX and Etrade were self-clearing, but not out the box - but there was no APEX relationship back then in the US. Penson the predecessor cleared oX Canada at one point. oX has been Schwab for a while so that leaves me to believe TradeKing, not certain where their successor clears