When I tried to login to First Metro Securities today, it says that my password already expired and won’t let me log in. I think I went to the classic version and tried to login too but when I changed my password, it successfully changed it but won’t let me login with the new password. After some back and forth, the web developer me discovered the issue and saved me from being locked out.

The Situation

My passwords are usually long around 40 characters with numbers, upper case and lower case letters and mixed with symbols to make a strong password. First Metro Securities says it accepts passwords with 8-20 characters in length. Of course I’d like to use the full 20 characters for a strong password.

First Metro Securities also forces passwords to include symbols as part of the password validation rule. I tried to reset password at least 3 times and they seem to accept my 20-character password just fine. However, when I tried to login using that newly set password, I’m not able to login as it says password is invalid.

One thing to note though is that on their forget password feature, they will send you a temporary password but will force you to change it upon login. I think this is better than that large institution in the Philippines that sends you your plain text password if you ever forget it.

Problem Solved

Frustrated and afraid of being locked out, I tried to change my password once again on the classic version of their website and entered the temporary password. On the new password field, I inspected the textbox and I found out that the maximum length is only 16 characters. I suspect they accept the full 20 characters in their backend system, but the frontend incorrectly limited it to 16 characters.

Of course, I ended up using just 16 characters for my password. I don’t want to mess around with editing the textbox and setting the max length to 20 as it might introduce more issues for me (or maybe not).

What’s important is to be able to login and manage my positions. It’s quite a good run this week as there are few momentum stocks that are showing strength.

That’s it!