curious about your opinions on E*TRADE. will they exist as a distinct entitity in 3 years ??? best, surf
They have entered into other lines of e-finance. I think their mortgage business is doing really well. As far as the broker side, I would think they would have to keep it to be a financial supermarket. It will become less important as time goes on. They need to be realistic about volumes expanding from thtese levels.
Etrade mortgage biz will do ok but the trading side will suffer greatly. The just bought Tradescape.com/scampscape.com and realized it was a big losing venture, fired the CEO and trying to find a way to save it. No wonder Softbank dumped all their shares. Etrade is pushing AB Watley's UTII software on the retail clients. A Daytrading firm that's going belly up + pos software that's written in basic with an Apple II = disaster Murphy
Lightspeed is good software but it won't do you any good when the firm's doors are closed because they lost all their customers.
As soon as they saw there customer base start to shrink, they shifted there focus to the mortgage, and banking industry. they spent too much money on piss poor companies over the last year. I should not have to mention any names but the chicago stock exchange is a good place to start. they got into the mortgage, and banking business to late and management doesn't have clue to what is going on at E*TRADE. There stock will be trading on the same exchange where most of there customers got Screwed OTCBB!!!!!!!!. And no company in there right mind would merge with e*trade, or spend nearly the amount of money they would be asking for. I see chapter 11 written all over the walls. as soon as the refinancing slows they are a dead duck.
E-trade shareholder voted for its adoption. Good luck taking them over. They think they are all that, and their $hit doesn't stink. Nobody cares about them anymore. Look at the broker site hereatek, now Ameritrade, IB, Tradestation. All other threads are dead.
A couple of snippets I just found in a B of A Securities research report from July: "But delivering promises is taking a toll. As the company cuts marketing, raises fees, and changes it funding mix to deliver earnings, we are seeing 1) 10%-plus brokerage account attrition, 2) larger drop off in trading versus peers, 3) much higher account acquisition costs despite marketing reduction, 4) fewer new brokerage accounts, and 5) declining bank accounts/deposits." and "How will deposits grow? ET is no longer paying top 1%nationwide rates on deposits, which resulted in an 8% drop in deposit balances in 2Q. Combined with the impact of significantly lower marketing spending and slowing cross-sell to brokerage customers, we question what will drive deposit growth going forward."