E Trade Group Inc

As stocks soared in the 1990s, countless Wall Street wannabes became "day traders" -- quitting their jobs and making their living by trading stocks at a furious pace. When the boom ended, so did the day-trading craze. But rising stock prices and new highs in major stock indexes have tickled investor interest, and aggressive trading by individuals is on its way back. "There's no other way to live," said Robert Earl, a 52-year-old Long Beach man who began trading full time in 2004.

Shares of online brokerage TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. rose the most in more than a year after reports said the company was in talks to merge with smaller rival E-Trade Financial Corp. TD Ameritrade, the third-largest online broker by client assets, and E-Trade, the fourth-biggest, have been in "serious discussions for weeks," the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Shares of TD Ameritrade, based in Omaha, climbed 80 cents, or 4.9%, to $17.

Mortgage woes dealt a double whammy to the securities industry Monday as online broker E-Trade Financial Corp. slashed its 2007 profit forecast, citing losses on home-equity loans, and Merrill Lynch & Co. said it was cutting jobs at its sub-prime lending operation. The disclosures show how the New York-based financial firms miscalculated in trying to benefit from home loans, a sector outside the companies' core businesses.

Online brokerage E-Trade Financial Corp. said Monday that fourth-quarter net income rose 44%, helped by recent acquisitions. The results topped analysts' consensus estimate. Profit was $129.4 million, or 32 cents a share in the period ended Dec. 31, up from $89.8 million, or 24 cents a year earlier. Revenue rose 19% to $479 million. E-Trade bought rivals Harrisdirect and Brown Co. last year.

Mitchell Caplan, E-Trade Financial Corp.'s chief executive, is reluctant to explain how his company came to own 1 million shares of BoysToys.Com Inc., a San Francisco strip-club operator that went bankrupt in 2001. "I'm not interested in talking about it so much," Caplan said in a recent interview. "It just encourages the bad guys." E-Trade, a discount broker, bought the BoysToys shares from customers whose accounts were stuffed with the near-worthless stock in August, according to a Sept.

The online brokerage business may be on the verge of another big consolidation wave -- which also could mean a halt to ever-sliding stock trading commissions for small investors. Merger rumors involving three of the industry's largest brokerages began to swirl around Wall Street on Friday, and drove some of the players' stocks up sharply Monday. E-Trade Financial Corp., the third-biggest online broker ranked by daily trade volume, has sent a letter to No. 2-ranked Ameritrade Holding Corp.

Online broker E-Trade Financial Corp. said Monday that it would buy U.S. rival Harrisdirect from Canada's BMO Financial Group for $700 million in cash to strengthen its position in the online brokerage industry. The deal will help New York-based E-Trade to accelerate its growth plans by gaining 430,000 customers with an average account balance of $70,000. BMO, on the other hand, is getting rid of a business that lacked the necessary scale to be successful in the long term.

A combination of the online operations would form the second-largest U.S. discount broker, analysts say. In what could be the final stage of its long hunt for a U.S. partner, Toronto-Dominion Bank said Tuesday that it was in talks to merge its U.S.-based TD Waterhouse online brokerage with discount rival E-Trade Financial Corp.

Two of the biggest online brokerages, E-Trade Financial Corp. and TD Waterhouse, said they had ended talks about combining their operations. "Both companies agree that while there were potential benefits to concluding a transaction that merited serious discussion, they were unable to arrive at mutually agreeable terms," the companies said in a news release Sunday. The companies confirmed last week that they were talking about a possible combination.

For Christos Cotsakos, the revolution ended abruptly Friday. The controversial head of online trading firm E-Trade Group Inc., a key player in the late- 1990s Internet stock-trading frenzy whose ads once proclaimed, "Welcome to the next revolution," unexpectedly resigned as chairman and chief executive of the company. Cotsakos' departure came two days after Menlo Park, Calif.