E-Trade Many People Around the World Invest

E-Trade

Many people around the world invest their money into stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other types of investment accounts. Before the mid-nineties, individuals had to work through a local brokerage firm or seek help from a personal financial advisor to access and trade their investments. With the spread of the internet and its explosion into many fields in the recent years, trading of investments is much different today. Individuals have the option to subscribe to a variety of online trading sites to manage and trade their investments themselves. This gives greater flexibility to the end user, and real-time access to their investments. Some examples of sites that are available today are TD Ameritrade, Scottrade, and E-Trade. In the following E-Trade will be reviewed. How E-Trade works, the history of E-Trade, their use of information technology and the internet, and how they use e-commerce in everyday business transactions will be analyzed.

E-Trade is one of the most widely used online brokers today, and is highly recommended by its users and those in the investment field. Well-known sources such as Business Week, Forbes, and Smart Money rank E-Trade as the best online trading company. E-Trade buys and sells individuals stocks for the customer's account. Depending on the type of trade and amount of trades made, there are fees, known as commissions that are charged. These fees would be assessed if a local brokerage was used as well, so it is not new to online trading. Most individuals can sign up to be an E-Trade customer. To do so the customer must complete an online application and make the minimum $1,000 deposit into their account (E-Trade). As soon as the money is in their account the customer may begin to use E-Trade's services. The customer may choose to buy or sell their stock, view order statuses, obtain quotes, and more. Customers using E-Trade can buy and sell not only stocks, but also bonds, mutual funds, options and futures. E-Trade currently has 4.3 million customer accounts and $189 billion in customer assets worldwide (E-Trade). Additionally E-Trade now provides banking services complete with a savings account. They also offer retirement planning, online trading seminars and quote and charting services (Wikipedia).

The company began as Trade Plus in 1982 when it was created by William Porter and Bernard Newcomb in Palo Alto, California. This company handled personal advising and stock trading; it was profitable for Porter and Newcomb. Later in 1991 William Porter used money he made from TradePlus to open a new company named E-Trade. E-Trade offered online trading through America Online (AOL) and CompuServe (Wikipedia). The company began to grow and completed a few name changes throughout the years; in 1994 changing to E-Trade Group, and in 1996 changing to E-Trade Financial Corporation which is its current name. In 1996 E-Trade became a publicly traded company. Today the company is headquartered in New York City and has over 3,000 employees with 28 retail branches in the United States (E-Trade). E-Trade has now been pioneers in online trading and investing for over 20 years (E-Trade).

Without information technology none of the electronic trading companies, including E-Trade, would be in existence. Information technology, including the internet, the software, and hardware are all necessary pieces for E-Trade's solutions to continue to work. E-Trade's software is proprietary, home-built, software which they use to maintain the customer's accounts and their transactions. E-Trade's software supports the live streaming of market prices on which its customers can trade and obtain quotes. Their software is able to connect and stream live by connecting to the API's of the various exchanges. E-Trade is still growing today hand-in-hand with information technology. For example in recent years social networking has become a critical communication tool between individuals as well as companies. E-Trade has just released its "E-Trade Community" which uses the power of social networking to their advantage (Team Trefis). This new tool allows customers to collaborate with each other, share their ideas, and discuss investments. This allows customers to receive input on investments from peers instead of only looking to personal advisors. This new tool has received positive reviews and triggered higher stocks for E-Trade.