From Yahoo! Finance Motley Fool A Bigger Day-Trading Brokerage ... Great Thursday October 19, 11:20 am ET By Selena Maranjian Just what the world needs -- a bigger day-trading brokerage. According to an Associated Press story, "Two brokerage companies that cater to active traders are joining forces to create a company that will be a large player in the day-trading business." The parties are Schonfeld, the retail-trading unit of closely held Schonfeld Group Holdings, and Lightspeed Professional Trading, a unit of Lightspeed Holdings. Together, they'll hold about $250 million in customer assets. http://biz.yahoo.com/fool/061019/116127124803.html What is strange is at the end of the article: the author is clearly asking for Clients to open up accounts & go through Motley Fool, who, I know, is getting kickbacks!!! I did not know that you could actually buy advetorials on Yahoo! I have some ideas lol --RS
What a schmuck. From the article: "If you're buying or selling 143 times in a day, you're not exhibiting characteristics of rational investing, where investors generally find companies they deem to be undervalued and hold on for a while, expecting eventual appreciation. They ideally consider themselves part owners of real businesses. What's so bad about day trading? Well ... day traders tend to spend most of their many investing hours glued to monitors -- tracking the minute-by-minute movement of stocks and placing orders. They'll typically place scores of orders each day and hold each stock for no more than a few hours. Many ignore company fundamentals, focusing only on what might make the stock move in the very short term. While investors may aim to pay long-term capital gains rates by holding stocks longer than a year, day traders are stuck paying at the higher short-term rate."
here is a link to an earlier dated press release on this www.lightspeedtrading.com/Public/Content/Content.aspx?id=news2006_10_05 Schonfeld Group and Lightspeed Holdings to Merge Retail Trading Operations -- Combined Company to be Clear Leader/Active Consolidator of Professional Trader Business; Deal Roughly Doubles Individual Company Volumes -- -- Merged Business to Offer Advanced Technology/Execution Platform for Trading Partnerships and Hedge Fund Community -- NEW YORK, October 5, 2006 - Leading trading and technology firms, Schonfeld Group Holdings, LLC and Lightspeed Holdings, LLC, today announced the two companies have signed a letter of intent to merge their retail trading operations into what will represent one of the largest companies dedicated to the professional trader. Under the agreement, Schonfeld Group's retail trading entity, Schonfeld & Company LLC, will combine with Lightspeed Professional Trading LLC, a subsidiary of Lightspeed Holdings. While financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, Schonfeld Group will become a major shareholder in Lightspeed Holdings. Lightspeed Holdings acquired the active trading business of E*TRADE Professional Trading, LLC and ETP Technologies, LLC from E*TRADE FINANCIAL Corporation in July of this year. The combined company will operate under the Lightspeed brand and be headed by Lightspeed Holdings CEO Stephen Ehrlich. Schonfeld & Company's CEO Andrew Actman will join the management team at Lightspeed. "This combination creates a giant in the field of active trading," said Mr. Ehrlich. "We believe we are seeing a convergence between the needs of the highly-active retail customer and the small to mid-size hedge fund manager, and the combined company's direct market access trading and brokerage services solutions will fit the needs of both of these groups." Following the merger, Lightspeed Professional Trading will be the leading player in the active trading industry with: Approximately 100,000 trades a day. Approximately $250 million in customer assets. Approximately 2% of Nasdaq share volume. Steven Schonfeld, CEO and Founder of Schonfeld Group, said: "By partnering with Lightspeed, we are well-placed to continue the consolidation of the active trading space - an industry about whose growth prospects we remain very excited." Schonfeld continued, "This transaction enables our company to focus more closely on our proprietary trading and asset management businesses." Andrew Fishman, Schonfeld Group President, added, "The trading business rewards scale. Our ability to send significantly more trading volume through a superior trading platform positions our retail customers and Lightspeed Professional Trading customers for great success. We are also pleased to further our goal of diversifying our retail trading customer base beyond the branch office model. Following several consolidating asset acquisitions, including those of Trinix Securities and ETG, we are now even more well-balanced in our approach to this market."
Love it! For successful traders, all this new interest in the markets is just grist for the mill. Common all you real estate "geniuses," (you must be brilliant at investing, after all you made a bunch in RE!), open some fat trading accounts. Jump on in!!! Good trading to all.