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Comment by jermaustin1 | Hacker News Reader

> such mediocre customer support.

I agree 1000% with this. I "recently" switched from RH to ally since I already have a decent chunk of cash there, and I am STILL waiting on my cost-basis to transfer. It has been over 75 days since they transferred my stock and cash, and every time I reach out to customer service they feed me the same canned response that due to volume of transfers it is taking longer than expected and they have no ETA on when my cost-basis will transfer.

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This happened to me when I transferred to Schwab. Surprisingly it was Schwab the one that eased my mind. I called them and they put me through the cost basis department which told me that RH basically has to prepare the cost basis manaually and pass it to them/ They told me that it had been taking a while but that they were indeed receiving the Cost Basis for other customers.

So I just had to wait. Of course this sucks because it blocks you from selling, but it will eventually show up.

Does it actually block you from selling? I think you really need to have the cost basis figured out for tax time - you sure Schwab won't let you? Even with a manual request?

Same deal here, switched to Vanguard. After a few weeks I called in to ask about it and they offered to send a letter to RH on my behalf to get that information transferred. Sure enough, about 2 weeks later all my information was in Vanguard!

Baffling that the US financial market is simultaneously run by supercomputers built as close to the physical stock market as possible to reduce latency, and then also manual letters and people personally mailing checks and such.

Is it actually baffling? The computers do the very specific narrow set of operations (post order, match, accept fills, cancel) while the much broader range of "what else may come up" is less automated.

Yes. Sell stock, subtract from this account, add to account in another bank is something that should be trivially automated.

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