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Gold/Mining/Energy : Capital Alliance Group - CPT (CDNX) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Powell who wrote (72)	3/21/2000 8:27:00 PM
From: keith massey	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 960

When I first started research CPT/SEG I talked with several informed groups and the company and was informed that no other companies had a portal model running. Ken just stumbled onto this one and posted it on the stockhouse thread. (http://www.stockhouse.ca/bullboards/viewmessage.asp?no=1160109&t=0&TableID=0) It turns out that there is another company, Swiftrade, (http://www.swiftrade.com)that they are billing themselves as a portal for online investors similar to SEG. I must have missed this because they haven't gone live in foreign countries, haven't really advertised and don't have the scale that SEG is planning. The only service they currently offer is access to the US markets through their portal service. In the past year Swiftrade have only signed on two partner brokers in Hong Kong and London. I went and checked out their partner brokers and both appear to be very small. United Mok Ying Kie Ltd, their Hong Kong partner, doesn't show up in the top 15 for Hong Kong and I could find anything about them on the web. I called a friend who trades stocks regularly in Hong Kong and he had never even heard of them. As for ODL Stockbrokers... again nothing on the web. There parent company, Option Direct (http://www.options-direct.co.uk/index.html) is a medium sized option trading firm in the UK. From first appearances I would say that neither of Swiftrades partners are leading brokerage houses in their countries. In addition, it appears that Swiftrade has been at this for over a year and still hasn't signed on anymore partners and still hasn't gone live with their site. According to their site they will not be offering shorting or margin and will not be offering any live data for their Hong Kong service which is another small knock against them. It is inevitable that their will be competition for SEG's portal model. Any good business idea will always bring in competition and it is healthy for any business. One big advantage that SEG has is that the agreements they have signed with the leading brokers are long term exclusive agreements so no other portal can come in and take away the leading players. From everything I have seen SEG business model appear to be very solid with the potential to be the leader in this new business field. So I say bring on the competition <gggg> From what I have seen I don't think Swiftrade is any real competition. I think this is just a web design group that is trying to branch out in ever direction but just didn't have the business connections to pull off something as big as a world portal. Of interest.... The parent company of Swiftrade is ZiaSun Technologies and trades under the symbol ZSUN on the NASDAQ (http://www.ziasun.com/index2.html). ZSUN runs several fancy web sites (financial data, banner advertising, search engine) but it appears from their site that they are billing Swiftrade as a key reason to buy their stock. ZSUN currently has a market cap of $400 million Cdn and hit a high $700 million Cdn in Jan. Not bad for a portal with no leading partners that hasn't gone live in a foreign country yet. Best Regards KEITH