SHORT INTERESTS: TIPS, TRENDS, OBSERVATIONS

Secrecy close to home

As if Swiss banks don’t have enough to worry about, San Francisco-based brokerage Thomas F. White & Co. Inc. and Belize Bank Ltd. have teamed up to offer Internet trading that allows foreign investors to trade stocks in the United States anonymously. Here’s how it works: A Belize-based international corporation is established on behalf of clients, along with a corporate bank account and U.S. trading account, which the investor uses to buy and sell stocks via the Internet. Like the Swiss version, the service is pricey. It’s $1,500 to set up corporate accounts, with a $500 annual maintenance fee. Brokerage fees are $41.50 a trade plus 2 cents a share.

Appeal to body and mind

Its first efforts involved sexual innuendo. Now National Discount Brokers is appealing to the minds of its target market.

In a bid to add females to its mostly male roster of 110,000 clients, NDB has forged an alliance with Women’s Connection Online, a World Wide Web site for professional women. The company will provide investment advice and financial commentary for www.womenconnect.com in exchange for an exclusive link to its own on-line trading site, www.ndb.com, reports sister publication Crain’s New York Business.

“According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 47% of Americans with assets over half a million dollars happen to be women,” says company chairman Dennis Marino.

The company’s first big appeal to women came with its TV commercials showing a woman lying in bed, trading stocks from her laptop computer while doing her best impression of Meg Ryan’s deli scene in “When Harry Met Sally.” The ad ends by touting NDB as the broker for those “with a passion for trading.”

Poor little rich kids

Hmmm, maybe being the child of wealthy parents isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

A recent U.S. Trust Corp. survey of affluent Americans (defined as those making at least $225,000 a year or with a net worth of at least $3 million) finds that their privileged offspring don’t es
cape household chores. Sure, almost all these kids (97%) have to clean their rooms. But a whopping 85% of those surveyed by the New York bank are required to wash the dishes, 83% take out the garbage, 75% take care of the family pet, 68% mow the lawn and 62% babysit younger siblings.

Here’s the kicker: 61% must vacuum and 51% have to do the laundry. The laundry!

Still, four of every five will have a trust fund to take over by the time they’re 28.

Great day for the Irish?

Offshore fund assets in Dublin — the one in Ireland, not California — have doubled to more than $50 billion since 1995, says the city’s International Financial Services Center. Yet when the Bank of Ireland and others decided to sponsor a Dublin offshore funds conference on April 17 — just one month after St. Patrick’s Day — they settled on San Francisco’s World Trade Club.

Bernard Hanratty of Citibank in Ireland says the Dublin pros “will provide information about the IFSC from a U.S. perspective.”

Guess that’s easier when you’ve got a view of San Francisco Bay.