160 Reasons To Not Use Etrade UK
I have been trading with Etrade UK quite actively and have about 160 transactions in my account. I was amazed to find out the other day that Etrade UK offers no way to export your account history data, so that you can easily calculate taxes owed etc.
Without an export feature I have had to manually copy and paste the details for each transaction into a spreadsheet in order to calculate my profit/loss and taxes due.
I contacted Etrade about this, and pointed out that their US site (and most other online brokers) offer an export feature but they didn't really seem to care.
Think 160 times before signing up with Etrade UK, or you will regret it come tax time!
Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 8:27 PM
To: uksupport@etrade.com
Dear Sir or Madam,I am trying to find out how to download my account/trade history from my account (for import into excel, etc). I see that the US site has this option under "accounts" but the UK equities site does not appear to.
Cheers,
Gordon---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UK Customer Support <uk-customersupport@etrade.com> Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 9:10 AM
To: Gordon <***********@*.com>
Dear Mr,Thank you for your email, apologies for the delay in getting back to you. In response to your email with regards to importing account history onto excel, unfortunately we do not offer the facility on our website. However our website is currently undergoing development and we are finding new ways of improving the facilities we offer. Hopefully we can accommodate this feature in the near future.
Should you require any further assistance please contact our client services department on 0845 234 34 34 or <mailto:uksupport@etrade.com>
Kind regards,
Jaynesh Shah
Client Services RepresentativeE*TRADE Securities Limited
42nd Floor
One Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London E14 5AA
T: 0845 234 34 34---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Gordon [mailto:**********@*.com]
Sent: 15 April 2008 20:28
To: #UK Support
Subject: export account historyGordon <**********@*.com> Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 11:35 AM
To: UK Customer Support <uk-customersupport@etrade.com>
Dear Jaynesh Shah,Thank you for your response. I can not stress enough how important this feature is to myself and many other traders. Without an export feature taxes, analysis, etc are all quite impossible (without manually copying the data for each trade) which is very undesirable for active traders. Your American site does offer the feature (detailed here: http://www.armencomp.com/tradelog/etrade.shtml ).
I hope that you implement this feature in the very near future, in the meantime I have applied for an Iweb share trading account and shall move my business across as soon as it is open. I hope that you will forward this email to management, now is not the time for Etrade's offerings (especially when a simple programming fix can solve the issue) to be lacking.
Thank you again for your time.
Kindest Regards,
Gordon---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gordon<**********@*.com> Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 6:29 PM
To: UK Customer Support <uk-customersupport@etrade.com>
Please be advised I have moved £***,*** out of this etrade account and will move the remaining funds away from etrade as soon as possible simply because you do not have an EXPORT account history option (your american site does). Without this feature creating tax and profit/loss reports takes hours of manual work.Hoping you add this feature in the next week.... another customer lost.
Regards,
Gordon
Day of Defeat Source, for 5 Dollars
This past weekend Steam offered users DOD:Source free to play for the weekend, and to purchase for $5 until Thursday.
If you spent a lot of time a few years ago playing Counter Strike and Counter Strike Source, then you might enjoy this game too. It certainly isn't the best game ever (Team Fortress 2 is) but for $5 it has provided great fragging relief whilst calculating my taxes.
Roomba 560 Robot Vacuum Cleaner
After seeing an Engadget article about a Roomba Pacman hack I was fascinated by the idea of a robot vacuum.Being skeptical; I searched for reviews and the Wikipedia page for the Roomba for more information about how well these things actually clean. I found lots of praising videos on youtube , which combined with the information on Wikipedia that the 560 is the fifth generation of Roomba convinced me to order one.
A few things to note about the Roomba 560:
- has IR sensors in the front bumper which allow it to slow down before bumping into any furniture.
- carefully navigates around the top of stairs without falling down them (not shown in the video).
- has an on-board scheduler and auto docking system so that it can clean and then recharge itself on a programmed basis without any interaction.
- will clean for about 60 minutes each cleaning cycle.
- using the included lighthouses you can block it from entering a certain room, or set it to clean one room fully before automatically going to clean the next room.
My Roomba arrived this morning. Below is a video of a quick run around my living room and entrance hall, at the end of the video I cut the cleaning cycle short to demonstrate the auto docking system.
You may also download a high quality .wmv version of the video here (147MB).
Red Alert 3 Game Play Video
The Red Alert side of the Command and Conquer series has previously provided a naval game play aspect that other games in the series haven't. RA3 promises to expand upon the naval aspect of the game as well as bring back favourite units including the Tesla troopers.
In the video we see that the traditional ore gathering method has been replaced with Ore nodes which harvesters simply dock with to gather ore and then return with it to the base. Many amphibious units and abilities have been added, including the Bullfrog amphibious troop transport and the ability to deploy the Soviet MCV either on land or in the water.
Red Alert 3 is due to be released later this year. Hopefully it will take advantage of multicore technology unlike Command and Conquer Tiberium Wars which would choke up during massive battles on a quad core machine with 4 gigs of ram and a 768mb gfx card.
Check out the video below or download the high resolution 400MB .mov version here (right click, save target as).
Engy Dinner by Cacti
This one is for the TF2 players out there, this animation by Cacti is hilarious (note you need to play Team Fortress 2 to understand what is going on here).
Mini CDN For My Blog Videos
After posting an example of 720p resolution H.264 video I was annoyed that whilst viewing my own blog I was not receiving the best video load rates, as my blog is hosted on a server in the USA and I am located in the UK.
Regular encoded .flv videos would load perfectly well as I could download from the USA at 200kB/sec and these videos only require about 90kB/sec of bandwidth, but the H.264 video requires about 470kB/sec to load/play instantly.
So, I have coded a simple CDN solution and now videos for users from the Western hemisphere will load from a server in the USA and videos for users east of the Atlantic will load from my server in the UK. I now receive download speeds of 480kB/sec which is just enough for the H.264 video and only limited by my broadband connection.
I shall expand upon the CDN code in due course, but for now it is a perfect and fully automated solution requiring no maintenance.
If you experience any troubles with the videos on the site then please let me know by posting a comment below.
H.264 Video in Flash
Adobe announced last year that the beta flash player supported H.264 video, and since then the latest Flash Player 9 release version with H.264 has rolled out and most people seem to have it installed (thanks to MySpace and other large social networks often forcing flash player updates).
H.264 is a more processor intensive codec than previous codecs allowing for much higher quality video to be stored in smaller files. Apple has been making use of this technology for a while now within their .mov offering, but the ability to play H.264 video with the flash player means that web video can easily take advantage of this technology.
I just grabbed the Transformers movie trailer from Apple (in 720p .mov format, encoded with H.264) totalling 105MB, and have plugged it into the flash player below. Check out the full screen quality!
Previously even with ON2 VP6 such quality would of required around a 170MB file.
Update 29th May 2008: I have uploaded three copies of the IronMan movie trailer to demo the quality of H.264 at various bitrates and filesizes. Honestly I have a hard time telling the difference in quality even on a 24" monitor. The 480p seems like a perfect solution for full screen web video.
480p 56mB
720p 121mB
1080p 197mB
TF2 Gameplay
One of the projects that I am working on is centered around gaming. I thought that I would post this video of some Team Fortress 2 gameplay, just for fun.
The machine specs: Dell Dimension 9200, Quad Core 2.4ghz, 4gig ram, RAID 0 HDD, GeForce 8800 GTX 768mb, and a Dell 24" wide monitor running at 1920 * 1200.
Update 30th May 2008: Added another TF2 video, this time with me playing as Pyro. Low and high quality versions below.
Send Faxes via Skype with PamFax
Trying to contact someone that is stuck in the 1980s? Previously I would hook up my laptop to a phone line to send faxes, but that was a real hassle.
I have just recently discovered the PamFax plugin for Skype, which allows you to send faxes using your Skype credit. PamFax accepts a variety of document types, I simply sent a PNG of my scanned document.
PamFax was kind enough to let me know via Skype chat that my fax sent without any issues. You can also check the status of your faxes via the "portal".
Higher Video Quality for YouTube Arrives
YouTube appear to be rolling out an option allowing users to watch videos in higher quality than before (example).
Not all source videos uploaded will be high quality/definition (cell phone video etc), but it appears that when a high quality video is uploaded to YouTube several conversions are now being made. This allows users with fast internet connections to watch the high quality version.
Sites, such as Putfile, that have had high quality video streaming functionality (example) for over a year have now lost an edge over YouTube which previously swayed some users to register on their site rather than YouTube.
With YouTube providing free high quality video streaming, revenue sharing, groups, and various other features; the days of UGC video sites popping up quickly or established non-niche sites even surviving are surely numbered.
