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Non-Tech : E*Trade (NYSE:ET) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Srinivasan Balasubramanian who wrote (7642)	7/17/1999 9:18:00 PM
From: Diamond Jim	Respond to of 13953

Thanks for posting it. I love this paragraph most(see below). Ameritrade is horrible, my account sits dormant there, I actually placed an order there last week, the first time in a year. I got no order confirmation, I called and got a busy signal at the confirmation 800 number they have, I tried the other number to go in to their telebroker, it rang 30+ times, I tried several times. At Ameritrade, nothing has changed and I will let my equity there sit idle for another year. I can't believe with an option to use E trade that anybody would use Ameritrade. "Consider this from Ameritrade's recent earnings report: In the latest quarter, the Omaha firm saw the number of customer accounts grow by 18%, while the assets in all accounts rose by 16% and its average number of trades per day advanced by 14%. So, each account added is smaller and, on average, less active."

To: Srinivasan Balasubramanian who wrote (7642)	7/17/1999 9:23:00 PM
From: WhySoSoon	Respond to of 13953

Barron's - Hitting the Wall Sri, thank for your post. IMHO, 1. the author may have treated a short term local minimum as global minimum. Calling it slow growth may be premature because of the well known seasonal effects. 2. I always find that statistics goes both way. It depends on how you interpret the figure. One has to wonder the sample size and leads to the confidence level and the power of test of this survey. An important fact is that consumer behavior may sway over time. This is particularly true when there is a new product comes to the market. Most people are afraid of changes. But after a while they may feel more comfortable with this new product and see there are actually benefits. Then they may change their minds afterwards. I suspect this 70% people are not a definite 'NO' to OLBs but are likely playing wait-and-see (non commit at the time of survey). 3. The fear of existing brick and mortar outfit to enter the market. The author specifically pointed out the entry of MER will take away significant source of new account growth. While this is a possibility, however, the pure plays are well prepared and especially E*Trade is taking a proactive position. They are not sitting there to get slaughtered. The OLBs definitely have huge home field advantage and huge time edge. 4. The author went on to mention that the earliest adopters of online services are the heavy hitters. New customers do not trade as heavy as the earliest adopters. An obvious flaw is that human grow older. There will be new generation replacing older generation. Most of the newer generation will be computer literate and hence would adopt the online trading with ease. Some of them will be eventually heavy traders (or even daytraders). IMHO, the findings are inconclusive because of the limited set of the time series data and the author may draw his conclusions way too early and premature at this stage.

To: Srinivasan Balasubramanian who wrote (7642)	7/17/1999 9:25:00 PM
From: Diamond Jim	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 13953

I think E trade will have to settle for #2, I don't see how they can get past the name Schwab. Then again if Schwab has as many outages every week as they did last week they could lose the #1 position. If Telebank can truly give a 6.75 yield and still turn a profit, I think they will bring in the bucks as well. We'll just have to wait and see, I have said for weeks now that I think we will get an opportunity to buy at 30 again. I expect -.18