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Technology Stocks : Track Data Corporation TRAC -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Investor Clouseau who wrote (763)	2/23/2000 6:24:00 PM
From: GBT	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2005

(DOW JONES) DJN: =SMARTMONEY.COM: Crunch Time For Online Brokers DJN: =SMARTMONEY.COM: Crunch Time For Online Brokers By Matthew Goldstein Smartmoney.com NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--While much of the nation is caught-up in the "I Want to Be a Millionaire" craze, online brokers are tuning in to a more old-fashioned exemplar of the TV game-show genre: "Let's Make a Deal." Ever since Charles Schwab (SCH) announced in early February that it was paying nearly $500 million in stock to buy one of the nation's leading online-brokerage services for day traders, the industry has been abuzz with speculation about the next big deal. Industry watchers say several small online-brokerage firms are now actively shopping themselves to bigger competitors, while in other cases it's the big online brokers doing the initial courting. "My phone has started to ring. It did that right after the Schwab deal," says Barry Hertz, chief executive officer of Track Data (TRAC), the parent company of MyTrack - an upstart online-trading service that caters to about 25,000 active stock traders. "The traditional online brokers are trying to differentiate themselves. It's good to be wanted." For months now, experts and industry insiders have been predicting a wave of consolidation in the online brokerage business. With more than 150 firms now offering online stock trading, analysts say there are far too many brokers chasing too few customers. Even though an estimated 10 million Americans trade stocks online, it's becoming harder to find new customers. The cut-rate commissions online brokers charge only serve to compress operating margins and cut into net incomes. That price competition makes it all the more difficult for small brokers to keep pace with the bigger firms, which have deeper pockets to dig into and plan on spending more than $1 billion on advertising this year. Yet up until Schwab's acquisition of Texas-based CyBerCorp, there really hadn't been many major deals. If anything, it seemed more brokerage firms were rushing to offer online trading. But the Schwab deal may have broken the mergers-and-acquisition logjam. Some of the firms whose names most often come up in conversations with analysts and industry insiders about potential acquisitions include: A.B. Watley Group (ABWG), Web Street (WEBS) and Track Data. Analysts say the big online brokers are mainly looking for firms that, like CyBerCorp, boast an innovative trading technology and a lucrative clientele.