E-Trade
American financial services company
E-Trade (stylized as E*TRADE) is an investment brokerage and electronic trading platform that operates as a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley.
History
In 1982, physicist William A. Porter and Bernard A. Newcomb founded TradePlus in Palo Alto, California, with $15,000 in capital. In 1983, it launched its first trade via a Compuserve network. In 1992, Porter and Newcomb founded E-Trade and made electronic trading available to individual investors.
On August 16, 1996, the company (by then known as the E-Trade Financial Corporation) became a public company via an initial public offering. The company sold 5,665,000 shares of its common stock for $10.50 per share under the stock ticker "ETFC" on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The company figured prominently in the dot-com bubble, as both a way to speculate in internet stocks and an internet stock itself.
In October 2020, the company was acquired by Morgan Stanley.
Management history
In November 2007, Mitch Caplan resigned as CEO and Citadel LLC received a seat on the board of directors of the company after Citadel invested $2.5 billion in the company to bolster its finances after it suffered losses due to the bursting of the 2000s United States housing bubble.
In March 2008, E-Trade named Donald Layton, formerly JPMorgan Chase vice chairman, its new CEO. Layton had joined E-Trade's board of directors in November 2007, at the same time as the Citadel LLC deal.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “E-Trade” as american financial services company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as american financial services company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2607502. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982, 1983, 1992 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “E-Trade” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.