Ameritrade Launches Online Investor Index; First DailyMeasurement of Behavior of Online Investors.
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 1999--
Ameritrade Holding Corporation (Nasdaq: AMTD) today launched the first daily measurement of how individual investors are participating in the stock market - the Ameritrade Online Investor Index.
The Index, which is available at www.AmeritradeIndex.com to Ameritrade customers and the public beginning today, shows whether online investors at Ameritrade are net buyers or sellers on a given day, along with the top 10 equities bought and sold.
Ameritrade developed the Index in conjunction with Dr. Nicholas Polson, professor of econometrics and statistics at The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and a leading expert on market behavior and modeling.
The Index was unveiled at a news conference today in New York.
"There has been much speculation about how individual online investors are participating in and affecting the markets, much of it flat-out wrong," said Joe Ricketts, chairman and co-chief executive officer of Ameritrade.
"The Ameritrade Online Investor Index is the first actual measure of the activity and behavior of online investors, who have become a truly powerful, self-empowered force that is revolutionizing our capital markets for the better," Ricketts said. This thought is echoed by Dr. Polson: "Online investors are becoming an important part of the investment landscape. As a group, they are investors that make their own investment decisions, and the Ameritrade Online Investor Index provides a look at what they are doing."
The Ameritrade Index will be calculated and available several hours after the regular market close. It will feature a chart of the current day's Index, as well as a listing of the top 10 buys and sells for that day.
Ameritrade, Inc. customers and visitors to the site also will be able to compare the Index to other leading market indices, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Nasdaq 100, Nasdaq, S&P 500 and the NYSE indices.
"The Ameritrade Index will provide investors and analysts with important, new information about a significant and growing group of investors," according to Dr. Polson. "A recent study by Robertson Stephens shows online investors with a 37 percent share of the retail brokerage market. This represents about 9.7 million online brokerage accounts and $500 billion in assets. This quarter alone, one million accounts may be added to the online ranks. While there is a lot of market data, there is little good information specifically on what the online investors are doing," according to Polson.
