online trading order probs

Has anyone here had the following problem with National Online Trading? This happened 3 days ago and they have just responded today. Obviously they are very busy manually placing orders into SEATS.

I sent National Online Trading the following email after placing a "limit" order into the market to take out 25,000 shares on the sell side at 36 cents in a stock that was starting to run. Their response is listed further down and they are telling me that an operator placed the order into SEATS because the last traded price was 32.5 cents even though the market depth was sitting at 34.5 on the buy side and 36 on the sell side. My buy order was over 5% from the last traded price so it had to be manually entered.

It didn't cost me this time as I cancelled the order before it went through but it does raise the issue of a stock with a small number of shares on issue and missing the purchase or sale if it can't be placed onto SEATS straight away.

Cheers Cobby

My email to NAB Online Trading

"Can you please explain to me the problems you are having with straight through processing into the market?
I placed the following order into the market and noticed that the order was not filled with the 25,000 shares on the sell side at 36 cents.
Three minutes later the order had still not been filled and I then cancelled the order.
Just lately there is a considerable delay in orders appearing on the SEATS screen. Can you update what is happening with this please because if you can’t fix it I will be moving off to another broker."

Their response

Dear Mr X,

Thank you for your email.

Your order was a non-STP order as The Buy limit price (10.77%) overlaps the Last Traded Price by more than 5%. As such your order had to go through a DTR (Designated Trading Representative) to be processed. By the time the DTR could have processed your order, you had cancelled it.