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E*Trade Posts Second Quarter Profit
E*Trade Financial the online brokerage company has returned to profitability after posting second quarter profits on Wednesday for the first time in three years.
The company has not faired well after its business was negatively impacted by bad loans made by its banking division, which reported its seventh consecutive drop in loan loss provisions.
Net charge-offs, or loans that E*Trade doesn’t think it can collect, were $US225 million ($252m), falling 42 per cent from a year ago.
E*Trade gave its earnings a boost by releasing US$60 million from its loan loss as opposed to adding to it, suggesting that the company now believes it has enough capital to cover any impending losses.
The in improvement in the company’s loan portfolio during the second quarter was the difference between E*Trade reporting a profit rather than a loss.
In an interview with Dow Jones Newswires, E*Trade chief executive Steven Freiberg said: “The most significant dollar change (for the company) has been continued improvement in delinquencies and therefore write-offs and provisions in the legacy loan book.”
Mr. Freiberg took the helm at E*Trade on April 1st, and given the current state of the U.S. economy says the company would probably experience a continued decline into 2011.
A closely followed metric with E*Trade is its daily average revenue trades (DARTs), which it reported as being 170,000, up ten per cent from the first quarter however still 16 per cent below where it was a year earlier. The broker like its rivals benefitted from the “flash crash” on the U.S stock market in May 6.
Mr. Freiberg said, however, that trading in June was “not anywhere near as robust,” adding that the “residual effects of the flash crash have caused more investors to become concerned”.
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Westpac Launches Revamped Online Trading Platform
Australian banking major Westpac Banking Corporation has joined its rivals in improving its online trading platform as the lender gears up to grow its client based by as much as 8 per cent during 2010.
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Merrill Lynch To Sell Berndale Securities
Global investment banking giant Merrill Lynch has put up for sale its Australian stock broking affiliate Berndale Securities which provides stock clearing services and is the largest provider of such services in Australia.
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It’s Never To Early Or Late To Trade The Market
Equity markets worldwide have rallied by over 30 per cent since the beginning of March, and though once bitten twice, shy, it really looks like some kind of bottom has been established, and the rally is not just a dead cat bounce.
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Volumes Doubling In Australian CFD Market
There has been an increasing trend by retail investors to eschew traditional fund management or investment products in favour of cheap and fast off market derivative instruments known as Contracts For Difference (CFD’s) according to CFD market maker IG Markets.
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CBA and Westpac Ink Online Trading Agreement
Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Westpac Banking Corp, have both signed a four year agreement with one another to provide online share trading and portfolio administration services.
The agreement is in actual fact between two Westpac Banking Corp subsidiaries, and a CBA unit. Westpac subsidiaries, Westpac Securities Ltd and BT Portfolio Services Ltd, did signed a deal with CBA unit Australia Investment Exchange Ltd, which is part of its brokerage division CommSec.
CommSec managing director Matt Comyn said CBA was committed to becoming the leading provider of wholesale financial services in Australia.
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Need A Good Broker for All The Cheap stocks out There? Try St. George’s Directshares.
Warren Buffet thinks that stocks all over the world are attractively priced right now. He seems to have an awful lot of confidence in US equities and is putting his money where his mouth is. In fact I would have to agree with him and my own personal view is they do seem cheap to me. But just after I bought some equities at the beginning of November, world equity markets went into free fall and I found myself having to return time and again to Mr. Buffet’s op-ed piece in the New York Times for comfort, when the pain it seemed, was just too much to bare.
If you can stomach a roller coaster in the short and medium term, then it’s worth thinking about a punt. Perhaps the easiest way I can think of buying Australian stocks is through an online broker like St George’s directshares. They are my broker of choice, just because it was so easy to set up an account with them, If you already have a Power Saver bank account with St George like I did, then setting up a St. George’s directshares trading account is a complete doddle. Here is my logic though, and in large part I have plagiarised from the Sage of Omaha, because he is the world’s greatest investor and I am sure he uses a St. George’s directshares trading account when he buys a few billion dollars of equities!!!
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