STAYING AHEAD 71  
Because of the stock market crash, are you rethinking whether to use a discount broker? Many discountersÛª customers think they didnÛªt distinguish themselves in the crisis.</br></br>Frantic investors jammed the telephone wires of the big national discounters, such as Charles Schwab & Co., and got busy signals. Although thousands of customers got through, thousands more couldnÛªt reach their brokers. As a result, they couldnÛªt sell stocks that were going down or buy stocks that looked to them like bargains.</br></br>A certain number of busy signals were inevitable, given a 604 million-share day like Black Monday. But Scott Staps, a spokesman for the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), said: ÛÏWeÛªve heard of extreme cases where people couldnÛªt get through [to their brokers] for five to seven days.Û</br></br>The NASAA has set up a toll-free telephone number to receive post-crash complaints about brokers, both discounters and full-service firms. By Friday, Dec. 4, it had</br></br>Some smaller full-service firms have been accused of deliberately not answering then-phones, to avoid taking sell orders in the stocks of risky companies they had brought public.