Welcome to E-Trade, the best home for all your online financial services.  There's a good chance that you heard of E-Trade, since they advertise in a lot of ways, but you probably don't understand what E-Trade is about and how it really works.  E-Trade was formed in 1996 and has grown significally since that time.  E-Trade is a global financial powerhouse and is owed by a humble Christos Cosakos.  E-Trade is second to only Merril Lynch and it controls 14% on the online brokerage market.  Much of E-Trade success is credited to Cosakos, since he continously thinks of new ideas and adds new services to propel E-Trade as the number one online brokerage firm.  With catchy phrases such as "If your broker is so smart, why is he still working?", E-Trade continously brings in thousands of new investors each month from all 50 states and 119 countries from Aruba to Zambia.  E-Trade is not just about online trading of stocks.  E-Trade offers services for all your future planning retirement needs, mortgages and equity, banking and credit cards, and mutual funds and ETF's. In order to get started with E-Trade , you first need to open up an account  You have several choices of what kind of accounts you can open.  You can open a cash account which limits your purchases based on your cash balance.  However, a minimum of $1,000 is needed to open an account.  You can also open a margin account and a margin account with options trading, but a minimum balance requirement of $2,000 is needed. There's also a few choices of how you can fund your account. You can open an account with E-Trade which will give you the power to start trading right away, but a minimum of $10,000 is required.  You can also transfer an account from another financial instiution, pay by check, or sell other certficates to fund your account. I chose E-Trade as a group topic for our class because i was interested about what E-Trade is about and what the requirements for an account were.  E-Trade is related to MIS because it is an Internet company that offers financial services right from the internet.  An E-Trade account can be accesed from anywhere in the world with an interent connection and information is updated as it unfolds in the stock market. E-Trade is run by Linux Systems and they provide number of financial services that can help individuals become financially stable.                                      SOURCES                                  WWW.E-Trade.Com                                 WWW.Scripophily.net/etrade.html                                  WWW.Money.Cnn.Com