Hawk’s Babble-Log

Some time ago, I signed up with a site called ShareBuilder, so that I could trade stocks online. I had used several services in the past, such as Etrade and some that don’t exist any more.

ShareBuilder sucks for the following reasons:

- Their site is up and operational… except when you want to use it.
- When their site goes down (see above), you can’t get anyone on the phone.
- They force you to change your password every month.
- They don’t let you use any prior password that you’ve used; they keep _all_ prior passwords that you’ve used. All of ‘em. Now _that’s_ a security breach.
- You can’t close your account. When you want to close your account, they have you withdraw all funds, cancel any automatic features, and unsubscribe from their email service… then they “consider” your account “closed”.

So, overall, I’d say they are extremely unprofessional. Even on the technical side, their site seems to be down more than it’s up and operational. At least, it’s down when I want to use it.

As I was trying to unsubscribe from their newsletter (the last step in their “close” procedure), their site crashed and I could no longer log in. I just kept getting an error page saying go back to the homepage and log in again.