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Non-Tech : E*Trade (NYSE:ET) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Church who wrote (5464)	3/6/1999 11:48:00 PM
From: Curtis E. Bemis	Respond to of 13953

The ever pervasive discussion of what will happen next, and what should the average investor do about it, is across all SI threads. In the February 26 issue of Science, the magazine journal of the AAAS, there is a News Focus article entitled "Death by the Numbers". This article discusses how the arbitrageurs play the game, how hedge funds play and what can happen to them--the zero-sum game. I can't post the article because it has a copywrite. Tis fascinating and I post a snippet below. sciencemag.org *************** Some competitors watched LTCM's fire sale with a certain glee. "It was hypnotic," one recalls, "then sickening." Sickening because it started to happen to everyone. "It wasn't supposed to be so hard to sell," one trader says. "What we missed was that other hedge funds were doing the same thing. That wasn't an input to anybody's model." Traders usually think of the market as something external. But during the crash, "[arbitrageurs] looked around," says RISK's Dunbar, "and realized they were the market." **********************

To: Peter Church who wrote (5464)	3/7/1999 10:53:00 AM
From: ecommerceman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13953

Peter--I've given up trying to time the market, so I don't spend a lot of energy trying to determine whether we're at the top or the bottom of the bull market (although I'll acknowledge if you can figure it out you're going to make a hell of a lot of money). I don't think that internet traders will fare real well in a prolonged bear market, and in fact think that they will fare worse than the market in general. At the same time, though, I have a great deal of confidence in E*Trade's management--their agreement with E-Offering, their aggressive international expansion plans (which are already being implemented), the Softbank deal--and have made the decision to stick with this company come what may. In short, I believe on-line investing is the future, and I'm not going to risk losing my stake with this company by momentum chasing and rotation.