Second Thoughts on Firstrade

I grumbled a little bit on Firstrade's price change yesterday. However one relief is that I just saw a post on their blog. At least they are willing to hear our complaints. So here are mine:

1. 1. As I said yesterday, I don't blame them for raising the fees. I am a firm believer that nothing is free and it has to be beneficial to both parties for any deal to last. However they need to improve their services. From my experience, their CSRs are not as helpful as Fidelity; funds transfers are rather slow at Firstrade, again it is instantly via Fidelity's moneyline. I can go on with this list, like that their website is not that user friendly; the portfolio feature has been broken for a couple of months already; they don't provide too many third party research...
2. Their NTF fund list is quite limited. Many excellent fund families, such as Third Avenue, Kinetics, Oberwise, IIRC, TRP etc, are not NTFs there but are free at a lot of their competitors.
3. There is no announcements on any automatic investments. If it is $10 as well for that, it is really a bad bad news for dollar average investors.
4. Last but not least, I hope that they can give a break for IRA accounts holders. $10 can be a substantial amount for a $4000 investment.

Still overall, I don't think it is a bail-and-switch strategy. I have been a happy customer and they have a great choice of funds. At least I have until April 2nd to watch and make my decision.