I hope Stewart didn't lose his job at Ameritrade. Here's news:
Ameritrade to Cut 330 Workers, Post Bigger Loss Than Expected
By STACY FORSTER
WSJ.COM
Ameritrade Holding Corp., citing adversity in the online-brokerage business that will result in a larger-than-expected quarterly loss, Monday said it will lay off about 230 full-time and 100 part-time employees.
Ameritrade had already laid off about 200 part-time employees in early December in the company's customer-service centers in Omaha, Neb., and Fort Worth, Texas. The company said it would offer new jobs to about 40 of the employees affected by the most-recent layoff.
Ameritrade also said it now expects its loss for the first quarter ending Jan. 18 will be larger than Wall Street expected. The mean estimate for the first quarter was a loss of five cents, according to First Call/Thomson Financial.
Ameritrade is the latest online-brokerage firm to scale back amid the recent market downturn. On Sunday, Morgan OnLine, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.'s ambitious private-banking site on the Web, said it was laying off about 150 employees in sales, marketing and other "client acquisition" roles. Charles Schwab Corp. last month said it had instituted a hiring freeze and would temporarily freeze salaries of about 750 top executives to curb costs until market conditions improve.
The layoff announced Monday is the latest in a series of troubles at Ameritrade. The company has been without a chief executive officer since August, when Tom Lewis resigned citing personal reasons. A spokeswoman for the company said a new CEO is expected within the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, OnMoney, a comprehensive financial-services portal owned by Ameritrade, has posted large losses without substantial revenue. Ameritrade said in its most recent regulatory filing that despite spending some $90 million on the money portal, revenue last year amounted to just $602,000. The company has slashed ad spending for OnMoney and said additional funding beyond March is uncertain.
In its earnings guidance to Wall Street analysts, Ameritrade said that after spending about $20 million on OnMoney in the final three months of 2000, revenue is expected to be $200,000, 67% less than the $600,000 the company had been predicting earlier.
The company also released monthly activity numbers for December. Ameritrade reported average daily trading volume of 115,000 trades per day in December, up 14% from November and up 9.5% from the same month in 1999. The firm added 52,000 new accounts during December, 30% more than in November 2000, but decreased 33% from accounts added in December 1999.
Write to Stacy Forster at stacy.forster@wsj.com. |
