When you're riding high, you don't have to answer to anybody. But when you've been slapped around for a while, it's easy to be humble.
Nasdaq, which has taken its share of left hooks lately, said it will cut the fees it charges individual investors to see real-time stock price quotes and other market information.
The second leading U.S. stock exchange is instituting a one-year pilot program where investors will be charged $10 a month, as opposed to the $50 per month they currently pay for the same data. This information lets them view real-time quotes, along with the size and source of the best bid-and-offer prices for a stock.
Active traders are the biggest users of Level 2 stock-market information but they often get the data from their brokerages over an Internet connection.
- - - More price cutting: The cost of broadband Internet access in Germany will drop by approximately 26 percent starting June 1, when Mannesmann Arcor cuts its prices for digital subscriber line connections.
Mannesmann, now a subsidiary of Britain's Vodafone Airtouch, will offer DSL for a flat rate of 49 marks (US$22.66) per month. Customers must also pay a charge of 89.90 -- a little shy of $50 -- for the DSL hookup.
The service will allow customers to surf the Web, as well as send and receive faxes from one connection.
Mannesmann plans to begin the service in 10 of Germany's largest cities -- Berlin, Hamburg, Hannover, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Stuttgart, Essen, Munich, and Nuremberg -- before extending it nationally.
- - -
Revving up: Car buying in Britain is a contentious issue, where consumer groups charge that auto manufacturers stifle competition, causing Britons to pay roughly 12 percent more than the European Union average.
Now, both Richard Branson's Virgin group and the Royal Bank of Scotland's Direct Line plan to sell cars online, a move that Branson says will "change the way we British view car purchasing."
Virgin.com/cars goes online Tuesday, and Direct Line plans to launch jamjar.com in July. Direct Line predicted that 15 percent of all cars in Britain would be bought online by 2005.
- - -
Vignette gets the picture: Vignette Corp. said Monday that it will acquire OnDisplay -- which, like Vignette, makes business-oriented software -- in a stock deal valued at $1.7 billion.
Vignette will issue 1.58 shares for each share of OnDisplay, which values the San Ramon, California company at $70 per share.
OnDisplay's XML technology allow business information such as purchase orders, inventory status checks, invoices, and product catalog data to be exchanged between multiple suppliers and distribution partners.
- - -
Briefly told: WebMethods, which provides business-to-business services for e-commerce, will acquire Active Software in a $1.3 billion stock deal.... LSI Logic, a semiconductor company, will buy DataPath Systems, which makes chips for communications applications, in a stock swap valued at $420 million.
Reuters contributed to this report.
