Company Overview

E-Trade started out in 1992 providing online trading services through America Online and CompuServe to the likes of Fidelity and Quick & Reilly. Its retail-brokerage website went live in 1996, and the company's stock skyrocketed during the tech and Internet boom. When the bubble burst in the early 2000s, though, individual investors left the market and E-Trade's commission revenue plummeted. The company has responded by cutting costs and by hedging its reliance on trading volume via moving into or beefing up other lines of business such as banking, mortgage lending, and selling research to institutional investors.