Short Takes: Discover Offering a Wireless Trading Service

lets customers manage their portfolios remotely.

The TradeRunner service allows customers of the San Francisco discount brokerage firm to buy and sell equities, mutual funds, and some options contracts. Investors can also examine real-time business news and stock quotes, view account balances, and receive alerts on market activity. To access the service, investors can use a palm organizer, the Internet, the phone, or they can contact a broker.

Discover, a unit of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., developed the open architecture system in conjunction with Aether Technologies, an Owings Mills, Md.-based firm. Discover offers packages from $49, for customers who already own a palm device and cellular technology, to $579 for those with no hardware, said Tom O'Connell, the president and chief operating officer at Discover.

That's excluding a $69 start-up fee and monthly fee of $69. Customers must also pay an additional $10 for access to various news wires, Mr. O' Connell said.

Unlike firms such as E-Trade Group, Discover will stop short at offering services like streaming stock quotes to retail investors, a service that gives them the same depth of market information available to institutional investors.

We're not tailoring any of our offerings to day traders, Mr. O'Connell said. We're interested in mainstream American investors.

Discover, which has about 160,000 accounts, charges up to $19.95 per electronic trade.

It is the latest firm to offer customers the ability to trade remotely.

Earlier this month Dreyfus Brokerage Services, a unit of Mellon Bank Corp. of Pittsburgh, launched wireless trading in conjunction with W-Trade Technologies, a New York firm.

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