I've seen people post blog posts about SureTrader and their "hidden fee's" before. To be honest, every single time I just think that if you aren't aware that SureTrader charges you 4.95 per trade, and the additional 3 fees then you haven't done your homework. For me it is absolutely essential to know approximately how much a trade is going to cost me, so I know how much the stock needs to run before I as a minimum can breakeven after trade commission. Now just to make it clear this is not a blog post, written to complain about people who wasn't aware of how much the trade commission is at SureTrader. No, this is a blog post to warn other SureTrader users about a mistake/scam, call it what you want, that I experienced this week with SureTraders commission. 

 

On one of my trades this week I placed an order for 300 shares. This order took a few minutes to get filled as the stock didn't move very much at set time. My order was thus first partially filled with 100 shares, and then roughly 1-2 minutes later I got the last 200 shares thus completing my order. I always check my trades on Iboss the following day to make sure everything is as it should be. When I checked this trade I could see that SureTrader charged me the 4.95 trade commission twice. In other words, they charged me 9.90 for my 300 share buy order even though it was the same order.

I contacted SureTrader as I was sure this was a mistake and it would be an easy fix - this was not the case.
The first agent I chatted with, basically had no idea about the trade rules, and when i kept asking questions about it she ended up closing the chat. This is obviously awful customer service, and I opened a new chat and got a hold of another agent. He was very helpful throughout the rest of the process, however I still got the impression that he wasn't aware of SureTraders Commission charges. I say this because in the beginning of the chat I was told that I can be charged multiple trade commissions on partial fills on the same trade if it happens over several minutes. For me this sounds absolutely crazy as I potentially could be charged huge trade commission without having any control over it - to give an extreme example I could place a buy order for 1000 shares that could be filled one share at the time resulting in a trade commission of 1000*4.95.

I continued to ask questions about it trying establish a timeframe of how long time there could be between my partial fills for them to be classified as one trade. This turned out to be exactly the right question to ask, as when the agent checked up on this, he returned telling me that I: 
"should not be charged an additional fee for partial fills if you have only placed a single order for the trade".
I now had the confirmation I needed, and asked the agent if he could help me get reimbursed for the additional charge. I was then given this answer: 

"In the event you are charged on a partial fill that you did not place, you would have to contact us to have the matter looked into. In yesterday's case, since it was moments apart, we would have to investigate this order. If the order was filled within seconds, we would easily determine that this may have been a partial fill, but moments apart would require our programmers to investigate the source of the orders that were placed to determine if you placed 2 orders instead of 3. Then your account would be reimbursed if we find that only 2 orders were placed"   

The reason that I post this quote is that I find it quite amusing/disturbing that SureTrader has to manually go back and investigate a trade because it it partially filled over a few minutes. For me this is either a sign of them having a terrible IT system or worse that they double charge clients on a regular basis on purpose. - Sadly after this experience I lean towards option number two. Especially because after asking if I needed to double check commission charges in the future to make sure that their system doesn't charge me for trades I don't make I got this answer: 

"Yes you should absolutely keep track of what you are being charged on your trades"

 

Anyways, I was told to send an e-mail to info@suretrader.com, and they would look into it. After sending them an e-mail I thought this case was closed as they'ed already confirmed in the chat that the additional charge was a mistake. 

However the next day I got the following answer from SureTrader:

"Thank you for contacting SureTrader Support. Please be advised Management has reviewed your Account and concluded the commission charge cannot be rebated on the trade you are referring to."

Now I am usually pretty calm, but this seriously pissed me off, as I knew they made a mistake and they just refused to accept it, thus basically stealing my money. I opened a chat with them, asking for a explanation of why I couldn't get reimbursed on the trade. After chatting with them for a while, I was told that the managers weren't available at the moment but I would receive an answer by e-mail.

After a while the case was finally closed when I got this answer from them. 

"As per our recent discussion via Live Help, your query has been revisited and management has revised its decision. Your account has been rebated the extra commission charge of $4.95"

 

Now, if any of you actually ended up reading the entire thing you might think that this blog post is far to long and that I went through an awful lot of work for 4.95. In some ways I might agree with you, but this was never about the money for me. I complained about it because I first of all thought it was a mistake and an easy fix.
Second of all if it wasn't I needed to know exactly how I was going to be charged when making trades with Suretrader. If it had turned out to be the way SureTrader does things I would potentially be better of buying on the offer side in some cases, as the additional 4.95 would be a higher expense than paying 0.01 dollar extra per share. 
Lastly I kept complaining about this because I started to get the feeling that they didn't have any interest in reimbursing me for the additional charge. Thus going out the way to make it as difficult for me to get my money back. 

 

I've never had any problems with SureTrader before this, however this made me seriously question how they do things. I ended up going back over every single trade I made so far making sure that they haven't charged me extra on any of them. I would strongly recommend all of you who trade with SureTrader to do the same thing as I have a feeling this is not a one time thing. 
If you end up finding extra charges on your past trades, please do me this favour when contacting SureTrader though live chat. Do not get pissed at the agents you chat with. They are just doing their job trying to help you, and in most cases it isn't them who is to blame for SureTrades mistake/scam.

 

If any of you have any questions regarding this entire thing please do not hesitate to contact me.