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Strategies & Market Trends : Online Trading - An Oxymoron? (EGRP, AMTD, NBD, DLJ, SCH) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Duncan who wrote (15)	1/23/1999 3:17:00 PM
From: BWAC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50

Bob, AMTD is one stock I would never think of shorting. It seems when service deteriorates the most is when the price moves up the most. Maybe the cozy relationship with NITE has something to do with that. Who knows? Advertising, advertising, advertising must be the way to go for your stockholders. But it certainly doesn't do your customers much good. Find a broker that can successfully balance the two and you will have a long term winner. Otherwise it is my opinion that AMTD is headed for a huge flame out if they don't change their ways very soon. Money thrown at an advertising budget can not successfully outpace word of mouth for an extended period of time.

To: Bob Duncan who wrote (15)	1/23/1999 4:00:00 PM
From: BWAC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50

Bob, another thought about AMTD along the lines of the impressive account growth. They are quick to say that account attrition was only 6,000. I assume these accounts were "closed". But where do they factor in accounts which have had significant assets removed or trading activity moved to another broker? For instance, we know from the press release that they averaged about 32,000 trades a day from a base of around 350,000 accounts. So IF: we group the accounts into 3 trader categories (Daily, Weekly, Monthly,). Try to make some assumptions and add up where the daily trades might come from. 1 trade a Month(280,000 accounts/20 trading days)= 14,000 daily trades. 1 trade a Week (60,000 accounts/5 trading days)= 12,000 daily trades. 1 trade a Day (6,000 accounts * 1)= 6,000 daily trades Well thats a total of 32,000 daily trades. So from those assumptions, the significance of losing 6,000 accounts depends greatly on which category they were lost from. If they were all daytraders leaving because the lack of service was killing them, then there went 20% of the business. And it would take 60,000 new accounts on the average to replace the lost ones. Assuming that no new knowledgeable daytraders would sign on.