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Non-Tech : MB TRADING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Green who wrote (4367)	3/23/1999 7:23:00 AM
From: agent99	Respond to of 7382

SEC Launches Inquiry Into Trading-places.net By REBECCA BUCKMAN and SUSAN PULLIAM Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission launched an inquiry into trading activity at a stock chat room that was profiled in a page-one article in The Wall Street Journal last week, people familiar with the matter said. The SEC's enforcement division contacted Chris Rea, founder of trading-places.net (trading-places.net), and asked him to provide more information about the Web site's financial agreements with brokerage firms, Mr. Rea said. He said the SEC also requested five years of personal trading records from Mr. Rea, who puts stock picks on the site but says he doesn't buy those stocks himself. Mr. Rea -- whose closely held Niles, Ill., company, Trading Places Inc., runs the Web site -- will meet with staff at the SEC's Chicago office next week, he said. The SEC, as is its custom, declined to comment on the existence of any inquiry, according to a spokesman. For his part, Mr. Rea says he looks forward to his meeting with the SEC. "It's good for them to see what we do," he said. "There's nothing to hide." Trading-places.net is one of a new breed of online-investment sites that offer rapid-fire stock recommendations to investors over the Internet for a monthly fee. Chat-room members, who pay $279.95 a month to belong to the site's "trading desk," also chime in with comments, but Mr. Rea and John Jordan, a part owner of the site, take the lead. Trading-places.net isn't a registered brokerage firm, however, and "day traders" who follow the site's picks must use another firm to actually place trades. Until last week, the site explicitly recommended brokerage firm MB Trading Inc.'s software to chat-room customers. (MB Trading is a unit of Terra Nova Trading LLC of Chicago.) But now, that language has disappeared from the site as part of a wider redesign that Mr. Rea said had been in the works for two months. Trading-places.net rolled out the new site late Friday, two weeks ahead of schedule, to better handle the surge of traffic generated by the Journal's article, he said. Mr. Rea said he had nothing to do with the recommendation being taken off the site, adding that the site's technical "Web-master" must have changed it.