Charles Schwab fails to provide sufficient transaction history

It is frustrating, in this day and age when I have a $20 USB key in my pocket that holds a gigabyte of data, that Charles Schwab, with their millions of dollars and thousands of servers, can't show me a single transaction I made more than four years ago.

They say they're "working on it". Well I'm working on transferring my account to Etrade. Let's see who finishes first.

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Interactive Brokers APIs

Looks to me like the only game in town for automated stock trading for individuals is Interactive Brokers. Sure, you could write a WWW::Mechanize script to slog through your broker's frame-filled web site, hoping you don't someday accidentally purchase 1000 google puts just because your broker changed the order of the items in the pulldown list, but I would feel a lot more comfortable entrusting my transactions to a broker that has given some thought to a simple online API.

Interactive Brokers seems to provide a Java API that they claim works in unix. Getting java working on my debian box and then programming in it sounds like the kind of pain I would not enjoy. But the Interactive Brokers TWS API Wiki also mentions C, Python, and Perl APIs that have been crafted by community members. Hmm...

[updated 2006-03-15] There's an application called Medved QuoteTracker that has a stock trading API. It, in turn, passes the requests on to one of the ~14 brokerages they support. Sounds like a jury-rigged solution that involves keeping Windows running on a computer or a virtual machine. But it just might work...

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