The Investor Diary Entry #25: March 29, 2023
The saga continues with my stock broker. My broker is no joke. The firm is one of the top stock brokers in the world. Yet the saga continues.
In my last entry I mentioned that I was still waiting for the rest of my HyTerra Ltd. stocks to be filled. After asking for a minimum amount of money that needed to be used to buy stocks from the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), the broker filled 70% of the order.
The rest of the order was still waiting to be filled.
Reasons Why It Was Partially Filled
Me as an investor and an end user of the broker’s platform, had no clue why the order was partially filled and not fully filled. There could be many reasons for this to happen. The idea is that I don’t know which of those reasons was in play.
Being transparent is crucial in this industry. Investors, especially small ones, are playing with money online without really understanding what is happening with this transaction or that move.
There are two main reason that I can think of why the order was partially filled. The first reason is that there was not enough supply of stock to accommodate the number of stocks asked for. The second reason is that while the transaction was made the price changed beyond the limit stock price asked for.
Of course, the third reason is a combination of the above two; that there was not enough stocks at the limit price asked for.
All that is great, but why would the remainder of the order disappear after few days.
The Disappearance Of An Order
When I created the order I chose that the order stays active until I cancel it. In the terms of my stock broker “good till cancel.”
Let us say that there was a rule that says there is a maximum amount of time for a certain order to be filled within; otherwise, the order will be canceled. I am fine with that, but how about mentioning those rules in a user-friendly and clear way to the end user.
The big issue here is that it was the stock broker which asked for a minimum amount, and it was the stock broker that made a partial filling less than the required minimum, and it was the stock broker who canceled the remainder of the order which would have satisfied the minimum required by the brokerage firm itself.
Again, this is not some broker on a street corner with a static website. We are talking about one of the top well know brokerage firms in the world.
The Upgrade
For past 10 days to two weeks, the stock broker was sending warning emails, and system warning notifications saying that I need to upgrade my desktop trading platform by logging into it or downloading it. First, I really didn’t understand what is required from me to do.
Do I need to just log into the platform or am I required to download it all over again. So as not to mess things up and lose the thing that they said I will lose if I didn’t do this upgrade, I did both. I downloaded it all over again, and log into it – several times. By the way I don’t know what it is that I might be losing, but I thought I should do it in case it was the whole pricing of the stocks that I will be losing.
After a couple of time of downloading and several times of logging into the platform, I kept receiving those warning messages. I didn’t know if those messages were just automated, or if it means that after everything that I did, it was not upgraded yet.
Finally, an email came and said, if you are still receiving the warning emails and notifications even after upgrading the platform, all one needs to do is log into the platform. I thought, well I did that like a hundred times already.
Anyway, I logged in for the 101 times, and guess what? yes, you guessed right; the emails and notifications kept on coming.
The Order Disappeared
Several times trying to buy the stock, and each time the broker comes up with a reason why I cannot buy the stock and what I need to do before buying the stock.
Once I fulfilled all those requirements that I had to discover the hard way, the broker filled the order partially without saying anything about the reasons for the partial filling or any rules regarding the remainder of the order.
The stock broker finally canceled the order, again without mentioning any reason and breaking its own rule of having to have a minimum amount to invest in ASX.
Conclusion
Dealing with such broker where transparency of operations and transactions is not within their dictionary, is a real risk. To me this is riskier than the actual investment.
The investment world has its rules and known risks, dealing with such a broker is without any rules or rules that you will discover after the event.
With such brokerage the chance of losing money for not understanding the broker’s platform is greater than losing money in investing.
I would repeat what I said before, play with paper trading before dealing with your own money. My broker was clever enough to ask for the account to be funded before allowing one to paper trade.
The Investor
Wednesday 29 March 2023
About The Author
I started to look into individual stocks in January 2022. I created this diary initially for myself to track my investing progress, and second as a place that I can share my ideas publicly hoping that others will share their ideas and learn from each other, and lastly as an online business where some links that I share are affiliate links, and if anybody bought anything by clicking those links I will get a commission based on that successful sale, which of course will not affect the price that you are buying the product or service at.
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