Earlier this morning I received an email from TD Ameritrade saying that my account had a negative balance. My face got numb and stomach tightened. No! No! It had been a few weeks since I last logged on. What happened? Quickly, I logged in and saw that both of my Ameritrade accounts had the balances that I remembered. There was no negative balance.
I called TD Ameritrade. Turns out I have a 3rd account that I opened back in 1999. I forgot all about it. I thought that my trading account from the dot-com days was closed. Nope. It was acquired by Ameritrade in some merger. They couldn’t close the account because I still owned 450 shares of Winstar. I worked for Winstar.
Back when Winstar laid everyone off and the stock tanked, I bought some shares dirt cheap as a lottery ticket that someone would acquire them. No one did and thus those shares are worthless.
Anyway, my 3rd account with TD Ameritrade is now closed. My heart rate is normal again.
