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Non-Tech : J.B. Oxford -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patherzen who wrote (1131)	2/20/1999 12:30:00 PM
From: Sir Auric Goldfinger	Respond to of 2220

Doncha geddit? JBOH is a shell w/ a piece of software and a lot of liabilities. NO firm will touch this pig and you are totally missing the point on DE Shaw (but then again so is most of the press). Read the online WSJ article below. JBOH is a crim infested joke. Do yourself a favor and go to freeedgar.com and read the JBOH Q's and K's fro your own edification. LAwsuits, SEC, FBI and NO cash to fund any growth even if they were really serious about it. READ UP! February 19, 1999 Merrill Lynch Agrees to Buy D.E. Shaw Online-Trading Unit By REBECCA BUCKMAN and CHARLES GASPARINO Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL NEW YORK -- Merrill Lynch & Co., under pressure to compete in the online-trading business, agreed to buy the online-brokerage technology unit of securities firm D.E. Shaw & Co.. The unit, D.E. Shaw Financial Technology, makes software and other systems that enable companies to offer online trading and other types of online financial services, including banking and bill payment. The deal marks the boldest move by Merrill -- the nation's largest brokerage firm but a laggard in the online arena -- to jump into the competitive field of online finance. When it confirmed the deal on Friday, Merrill Lynch said client-order entry for securities and mutual funds will be launched on Merrill Lynch Online for certain accounts within the next few weeks. Merrill said its site currently has more than 400,000 clients. However, the move doesn't mean Merrill plans to compete head-on with discount, online brokerage firms, whose commissions can be well under half of Merrill's. Instead, Merrill would use the technology to bolster its long-pending plan to offer investors a broad range of online services, including trading at roughly the same fees it now charges for securities sold through brokers. On Friday, Merrill didn't disclose financial terms. According to a person with knowledge of the transaction, however, Merrill likely would pay $25 million to $35 million for the software unit. D.E. Shaw, a hedge fund and securities firm, announced a major restructuring in early December after the partial collapse of a trading venture with BankAmerica Corp. Merrill officials long have said they don't want to buy an online broker, but would rather build their own trading system, which they insist is working now. They have also talked about a broader "electronic commerce" strategy involving selling other financial services over the Internet. Though Merrill is testing its online-trading system with employees now, it has repeatedly delayed the launch of its service during the past two years amid an internal debate over how to adapt its business to the Internet. Lately, officials have said they are doing further tests to make sure their new system can handle today's heavy trading volumes on the Nasdaq Stock Market, particularly in hot Internet issues. Merrill now says the launch could come as early as the end of this month. The D.E. Shaw unit, based in Cambridge, Mass., would give Merrill about 30 computer engineers, a person close to Merrill said, as well as a core trading system Merrill could integrate into its existing one to handle higher trading volumes. The unit also has software that immediately updates customer account balances after online trades; Merrill's current software updates online accounts once a day. Buying the D.E. Shaw unit "would indicate to me that Merrill Lynch is maybe having technical problems," says Bill Burnham, an electronic-commerce analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston Corp. "Or, they're looking at the problems other people have had technically, and this is a little insurance for the future." Merrill's chief technology officer, John McKinley, has said previously that the firm's technology is robust. But a person close to the company says Merrill has had trouble adapting its older systems -- geared toward serving its huge, 15,000-broker sales force -- to the new requirements of online trading. Much smaller firms that specialize in Internet trading have been able to jump into the business more quickly because they started from scratch, this person said. In December, D.E. Shaw announced a restructuring and said it would lay off 25% of its employees, close its California office and sell several securities-trading units. They included the financial-technology division as well as FarSight Financial Services, a tiny online brokerage firm also based in Cambridge that licenses DESoft financial software to other companies. A person close to Merrill said the firm isn't interested in FarSight."