Tag: E*Trade

Investing Is Simpler than You Think, Part 1: The Rise of Self-Directed Investing

I came of financial-career age at E*TRADE in the late 90s. The commercialization of the Internet was in its infancy back then, and so too was the world of online stockbrokers like E*TRADE and Schwab and Ameritrade and Datek (long ago hobbled and then subsumed into Ameritrade). At the juncture […]

I’ve Got a Problem with “No Problem”

Today I was on the phone with a customer service person from Vanguard and, sorry to say, didn’t have a great time of it. Being a customer service rep is a very difficult job. In the late 90s when I worked for E*TRADE (do they still all-cap it? That was […]

Luck vs. Skill: The Whitman Example

I knew folks at eBay while it was going through the steep part of the hockey stock — which is SiliconValley-ese for growing like all get out, the imagery being based on the shape of a graph of the revenues (and hopefully profits) of a company experiencing hyper-growth, with dollars […]

Big Machines

Twenty years ago, at the dawning of the commercialization of the Internet, someone described the POTS (the Plain Ol’ Telephone System) as the biggest machine ever made. It spanned the globe. It reached into virtually every home and business in the developed world. And it was all one — it was all […]

The Indefatigable March of the Asset Gatherers — The Gallop Home of the Bad Horses

There’s been much talk lately of banks doing away with “free checking.” The banks, the thinking goes, as a direct result of some of the new banking federal regulations stemming from The Great Recession, no longer have the un-checked ability to charge $35 and up as “insufficient funds” penalties (also […]