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

To: ecommerceman who wrote (7726)	7/21/1999 10:45:00 AM
From: Bob Kim	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13953

ecommerceman, I think Merrill's efforts were designed more to keep existing clients from leaving or shifting assets to other firms than to steal customers from the OLBs. One potential advantage of the OLBs is their ability to give more equitable IPO opportunities to their clients. Merrill seems to allocate IPOs to their most established clients, thus a new client is likely to be on the bottom of the priority list. E*Trade and other OLBs give a lower asset level investor the opportunity to become a higher level asset investor. With Merrill's system, it seems you are better off being wealthy to start. I am generally happy with my Merrill account, but still do the bulk of my trading via an OLB. One question you might want to ask the Merrill broker who called you is why doesn't ML give internet access to its brokers? Bob

To: ecommerceman who wrote (7726)	7/21/1999 11:37:00 AM
From: WhySoSoon	Respond to of 13953

EMan--ETrade should have collected enough data on how their new clients get to know ETrade by now. With this valuation information, it can now feed this data into a linear programming to optimize where, when and how to spend the money. The end result should be lower advertisement cost and bigger impacts. Some foods for thought: There is an interesting NR yesterday about EOffering comments on Reuters (owns Instinet) future in the online brokerage industry. Normally, you just don't cover a company with "Not Rated" until there is some conflicts of interest. Lets see how it unfolds... biz.yahoo.com