San Diego Housing Market News and Analysis

I too feel unsettled. But most of our funds there are FDIC insured, so I am not too worried. Later today, they came with an announcement that their exposure to sub-prime is minimal. But this tidal wave is sucking up all mortgage backed securities. In fact, anything other than treasury or government paper seems to have become worth less. This is too big a mess to surf sensibly. We can only hope to invest conservatively and pray!

err, yeah gracie, ETRADE is just fine. Keep your money there, no problem (at least until my ETRADE CD's mature in November, then you can get out.)

-one muggle

Careful, rumor has it that they had some possible insolvency issues today that led them to freezing withdrawals and some transactions. I was not able to move cash around between accounts and I got confirmation of similar issues from many other people including the CFO and finance dept. at my company. We have all of our options in Etrade and my main account is through them although I took out most of my cash earlier in the week. Just make sure your positions are below the 500k mark and cash below 100k. If you happen to be fortunate enough to exceed those numbers it's best to move positions and cash to other brokers and stay under the caps in all accounts. I would take the issue very seriously at this point. Today was scary and tomorrow won't be any better and likely much worse.

below 100k

That is the best universal advice anyone can give. It is the equivalent of "protection" in the post-HIV era! 

Pretrading, it's up 13% today after the fed move.

I actually bought (a small amount) Etrade stock yesterday at 12.87 (could have done better but hey I am up today !!),

JMO but I think they will be OK .

I noticed that Etrade had transfer problem yesterday when I wanted to transfer money in and out of the account. I had to call up their rep to let them do that. I am not sure if that is computer glitch or insolvency issue. Keep us posted.

From everything I heard it was more of the latter. There is not 100% confirmation on this but it came from too many reliable sources to not be of heavy concern.

Capeman, what other info did you hear to know that the latter is more accurate? I also want to see housing price keep on going down, but I surely don't want to lenders to go bankrupt. If they do so, then the economy of the US will certainly collapse and it is not a good thing to all of us.

This is from their site and is not the most reassuring way they could lay this out...

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--E*TRADE FINANCIAL Corporation (NASDAQ: ETFC) released supplemental disclosures today related to the composition and funding sources for its balance sheet. The Company provided a presentation containing additional information to its June 30, 2007 quarterly results, including expanded transparency on the credit quality of its mortgage and securities portfolios. This presentation can be found at https://investor.etrade.com. In addition, the Company stated that it has seen no material changes to date with respect to the availability, pricing or margin on its wholesale funding sources, including repurchase agreements. Management maintains that it does not believe that the current market capitalization accurately reflects the financial strength and performance of the business.

Selected highlights from the presentation include:

* The Company’s $15.7 billion first lien mortgage portfolio is supported by high FICO scores, low Loan-to-Value ratios (LTV) and private mortgage insurance
* All first lien mortgage loans with an 80% or higher LTV are protected by private mortgage insurance
* $9.2 billion, or 74%, of its home equity portfolio is to borrowers with FICO scores of 700 and higher
* $12.6 billion, or 99%, of mortgage-backed securities are rated AAA
* 97% of its Asset-backed Securities portfolio is rated investment grade
* Consistent and growing base of retail customer cash
* $10 billion in excess wholesale borrowing capacity from the Federal Home Loan Bank

As most institutions in the racket of home lending are finding their AAA rated MBS paper coming back as junk I am very worried about their exposure to insolvency. The CFO of the $800mil company I work for phoned in from vacation to warn everyone in the company. My most valued investment advisor wired out more than 500K immediately from Etrade. The next day there was a huge run at the Countrywide branches and a disclosure that >40% of the money in Countrywide accounts is not FDIC insured. I believe a lot of people are taking this pretty seriously. I myself am and I am really worried about what could happen to my short positions in the event of an Etrade shutdown. Scary. Just be careful and stay below the SPIC and FDIC limits in your accounts at any bank.

Thanks for your info.

I have a small second mortgage through Etrade bank. If they go out of business, do I have to keep paying the mortgage?(-: They are pretty freakish about late payments. Once I had to schedule my online payment for the 2nd day of the month instead of the 1st and they had a notice in the mail to me from a collection agency that day! By the time I received the notice, the check had already cleared my account, but when I called them they said it is their normal practice to send out notices if the payments are not received by the first of the month.

ETrade is in deep shit.....Look into it and  figure it out

Good luck