E*Trade, Still Growing Account Base (ETFC)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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E*TRADE Financial Corporation (NASDAQ: ETFC) has noted that customer cash and deposits
increased by nearly $1 billion in February, although total retail customer assets including customer cash and securities fell 1.7% month over month to $171 billion.

Total Daily Average Revenue Trades (DART’s) fell 17% month over month due to weaker market trends in February.  While electronic brokers are measured by DART’s as the bogey and that would be a bad number, the more impressive metric here is that E*Trade still generated 43,000 net new accounts in February to end with retail accounts totaling 4.8 million, up 0.9% month over month and 6.1 percent year over year.  If you were sitting here in November, you would have assumed that a run on the bank was a serious risk.

E*Trade has been a recent feature in our weekly "10 Stocks Under $10" newsletter, and it is an active call.

The company did also announce that R. Jarrett Lilien, President and COO will be leaving effective May 16, 2008.  Interestingly enough, E*Trade does not plan to fill the role of President and COO.

Shares of E*Trade are indicated down slightly in early pre-market trading, although we’d accept this as a win so far as it is still adding net accounts.

Jon C. Ogg
March 19, 2008

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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