ETFC

E*trade Financial Corporation

An online brokerage that lets everyday people buy and sell stocks and other investments from their computers and phones, now part of Morgan Stanley. It grew out of TradePlus, an electronic trading service founded in 1982 in Palo Alto by a physicist and a computer scientist. The company's very first electronic trade, placed in 1983, was made by a dentist in Michigan over the CompuServe network. The "E" in the E*TRADE name simply stands for "electronic."