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Strategies & Market Trends : Anthony @ Equity Investigations, Dear Anthony, -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Louis Riley who wrote (10383)	2/10/1999 3:50:00 PM
From: moby_dick	Respond to of 122087

I agree Louis - I like it longer term - has profits too! Wouldn't take much of a positive advance in the Internets to send this baby back into the mid-40s to $50. I averaged down to $32 and change. Good Luck. Moby.

To: Louis Riley who wrote (10383)	2/10/1999 3:50:00 PM
From: Erik Lundby	Respond to of 122087

Feb 10 (Reuters) - ETrade Group Inc. got hit with a second lawsuit after outages at the Internet broker's Web site prevented investors from trading stocks on three separate occasions last week. The suit, filed in the Santa Clara County Superior Court by the Alexander law firm of San Jose, Calif., is seeking unspecified damages for investors who claim they missed out on making money in the stock market because of the outage. The suit, which seeks class action status, follows a similar November 1997 law suit filed by New York law firm Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann in the same court. "E-Trade customers were unable to trade or obtain access to their online accounts on Feb. 3, 1999 for in excess of one hour, on Feb. 4, 1999, for in excess of two and one half hours, and for approximately one-half hour on Feb. 5, 1999," the Alexander suit said. "As a result of this 'virtual' lockout, class members lost potentially millions of dollars in damages." The attorney handling the case against the Palo Alto, Calif., brokerage, William Audet, was not immediately available for comment and an ETrade spokeswoman did not return phone calls. Like other Internet brokerages such as AmeriTrade Holding Corp. and Charles Schwab Corp. , ETrade has reported glitches and delays because of the growing popularity of cyberspace trading. One in seven stock trades now takes place online, according to industry estimates. Last week's outage at ETrade, however, went beyond the occasional delays customers faced in the past. One ETrade customer, Dar Hay of Memphis, told Reuters he lost close to $12,000 last week when he was unable to cancel an order to buy 350 shares of brokerage firm Siebert Financial Corp. Hay, a former systems analyst and now a full-time day trader, said he put in the order at 0950 EST/1450 GMT on Thursday last week but decided to cancel when the stock headed south. With ETrade's site for trading down, Hay said he tried to call the brokerage but could not get through. He also said he sent an e-mail at 1010 EST/1510 GMT. to cancel the order, to no avail. The order was executed at $60 a share at 1105 EST/1605 GMT. The next day he dumped the shares at an average price of $26 a share, for a total loss of $11,900. "I had no means of getting a hold of them; I was powerless," Hay told Reuters. ETrade responded to his e-mail message four days later, he added. ETrade has attributed last week's outages to malfunctioning software. The firm's chief financial officer, Len Purkis, on Wednesday said the problems were not caused by a lack of capacity. In fact, ETrade handled 300,000 trades last week, up from an average of 200,000 trades a week in its first fiscal quarter ended Dec. 31, Purkis said at a Goldman Sachs investor conference in New York. Still, some attorneys claim ETrade is not making good on its promise that customers can trade stocks 24 hours a day. "Our case is really targeted against ETrade's advertising -- which we allege to be false and deceptive-- in which they represent that their system is available 24 hours a day and that trades will be executed in a matter of second," said Lisa Buckser, the Bernstein attorney who filed the 1997 suit. "Even when they didn't have outages like they had last week, there have been many other times that people could not get onto the system." Buckser said she has received "hundreds of calls" from disgruntled ETrade customers wanting to join the suit. At this point, however, the firm is not adding new plaintiffs because a judge still needs to rule on whether the suit -- which represents four plaintiffs -- deserves class action status. A hearing is scheduled in April, Buckser added. ((--Jack Reerink/Wall Street Desk (212) 859-1725--))