ENGA (Engage Technologies) and TWE (TD Waterhouse) are featured at the website of the following venture capital magazine
techcapital.com
I found info in this magazine that warns me away from certain IPOs, so it's worth scanning every month.
Am personally looking for a decent entry point on TWE, (maybe around 20) but it might take a while before its large float keeps this stock from sinking further. Here's an article from the above-mentioned magazine about TWE:
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JULY/AUGUST 1999
TD WATERHOUSE SECURITIES INC.
This deal is big.
The value of the proposed stock sale by TD Waterhouse, a huge discount stock brokerage company, could go as high as $1 billion. And, as you will see, this is only the beginning of the big numbers in this story.
First off, the "TD" in TD Waterhouse Securities stands for Toronto-Dominion Bank, the fifth-largest Canadian bank in terms of assets. In 1996, TD Bank, as it is now called, bought Waterhouse Securities of New York, one of the largest discount brokerage firms in the United States.
At that time, TD Bank already owned a discount brokerage operation in Canada called Green Line Investor Services. And since it bought Waterhouse, TD Bank also has acquired several other small brokerage firms in England, Australia and the United States.
Waterhouse says it now runs one of the largest discount brokerage operations in the world, with 1.9 million active accounts and more than $100 billion in customer assets under management. The firm, a major player in the online trading business, also has money market and mutual fund assets that total $8.4 billion.
At this point, TD Waterhouse has 160 branches in 44 states and 38 branches in nine provinces in Canada, seven branches in Australia, one in Hong Kong and two in England. The company expects to have 200 offices in the United States by the end of 2000. Its offices are staffed by 2,300 people and altogether the company has 5,000 employees.
Waterhouse draws much of its business from customers who trade online. That business has been growing substantially. Stock trading through webBroker, the Waterhouse Web site, represented 54 percent of the firm's total trading volume during the first quarter of this year.
Waterhouse also has a voice recognition system called TalkBroker in use in Canada and is working on a similar system for its U.S. operations. TalkBroker allows users to get stock and mutual fund quotes by talking to their computer. Soon, the company says, customers will be able to place trades in the same way.
Waterhouse also has tried to encourage customers to use its Web site for online trading by developing alliances with America Online, Yahoo! and Microsoft. The deals provide Waterhouse with extensive advertising and promotional opportunities.
The management team at TD Waterhouse includes both longtime officials of TD Bank and executives of Waterhouse, including Lawrence Waterhouse Jr., 62, who founded the discount firm in 1978. Stephen McDonald, 42, who comes from the banking side, is the deputy chairman and CEO of the brokerage firm. Frank Petrilli, 48, who worked for Waterhouse before the merger, is president and chief operating officer of the company.
Does Waterhouse make money? You bet it does, unlike most of the companies going public these days. For fiscal 1998, which ended Oct. 31, the firm reported a $49 million profit on revenue of $615 million. Both were up more than 30 percent over the previous year, thanks in large part to the online service.
Indeed, Waterhouse may have the best of both worlds in these days of cyberspace trading. It acts like an Internet company, but it makes money like a bank.
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