Stories about: Datek

The sight of e-commerce giants jockeying for position in the Internet arena livened up the week for technology investors, while an IBM acquisition and disappointing news from chip maker ATI Technologies pointed to pricing and consolidation trends.

There's a business for just about everything, I'm convinced. Last week, I received a press release from a company that uses metrics to study brand loyalty among brick-and-mortar stores. Now the company, Brand Keys, has extended its Customer Loyalty Index study to include online retailers.

As network equipment buyers and vendors gather this week at the Networld+Interop (N+I) conference, both camps will have a special type of convergence on their minds: sending voice and data as IP packets over a single network.

Dan Borgmeier has had it with online trading. A 31-year-old executive at a Minneapolis Internet startup, Borgmeier set up an ETrade Group account in late 1997 and got hooked on trading after raking in $US30,000 from hot tech stocks while paying only $US2,000 in commissions.

Having offered US$12 trades since January 1997, TD Waterhouse Group Inc. is expected to announce within a week that it will increase fees for some of its trades to $15. Effective Sept. 1, the higher commission will apply to limit orders for its U.S. brokerage operations. Fees for market orders and all international trades will remain unchanged.

Study: German Dot-coms Hurting

Is the roller-coaster stock market making you feel a little queasy? No wonder: The daily gyrations of key market indexes is enough to make anyone reach for the Dramamine. Another remedy--when taken in appropriate doses--is staying abreast of the market using the Internet. Investment Web sites can help you quickly research stocks for free, a task that once took days and hundreds of dollars to do.

System outages and capacity problems rank as the chief concerns among executives at online brokerage firms, according to a new survey by Deloitte & Touche LLP.

An undetermined number of Datek Online customers were forced to make stock trades over the phone or by accessing the online brokerage through alternate Web addresses for half an hour yesterday due to a systems glitch.

New York, Friday, 2:15 p.m. Network Financial Global has spent four intense months putting together a multibillion-dollar deal. The merger and acquisition lawyers say that the contracts absolutely must be signed before 5 p.m. In addition, the banks must be given full legal authorization to move $450 million in cash, and the clearinghouse must be duly instructed to hand over $4.2 billion in stock to the partners in the deal. If the companies blow this deadline, a $125 million penalty kicks in.

Online trading site ETrade and Internet news site ZDNet were hit yesterday with another round of denial-of-service attacks, which have blocked traffic to other sites this week. The attacks were similar to the assaults that have pummeled eBay, Amazon.com and Buy.com, Yahoo and CNN.com.