Investors who have invested online at discount web sites may drop their current service provider and go to a full service firm. Full service firms such as Merril Lynch, Salomon Smith Barney and Paine Webber have entered into the online web trading war. The only catch is, unlike the discount firms; the full service firms offer professional advice. The full service firms have dropped commission rates and fees for online trading. The prices are still not as low as the discount firms, but worth the price for the available advisors and their expertise. Industry analysts have suggested that a lot of the discount firms will lose a lot of business due to the recent service offerings by the big names.

Merril Lynch & Co. led the way this summer by pulling in $16 billion in assets from its online trading. It accumulated those assets in the first three months of its program. A similar fee based program wi

Analysts say that as online investors become older, wealthier and more adverse to risk, they will seek out these full service firms for more guidance rather than going with decisions based on their opinion only. From 1992 to 1995, values of the portfolios of online more than doubled. "As this market has matured, more risk averse people have come online," says Rob Sterling of Jupiter Communications. Also as more and more money gets involved, investors will seek out advice from the pros. Guy Moszkowski of Salomon Smith Barney said investors won't want risk trading on their own "an amount of money that's not peanuts. Forrester Research n Cambridge Massachusetts has some interesting estimates. They expect the amount of money in an online investor's account to grow on an average from $69000 to $121000 this year. They expect accounts to grow to $3 trillion in 2003 from $374 billion this year. The number of accounts will explode to 20.4 million from 5.4 million cur

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