Intuit Buys Electronic Clearing House

Hi, Gang.

Maybe most of you already knew this, but it was news to me today!

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Intuit Inc. (INTU:Intuit Inc

4:00pm 12/20/2007

INTU 30.43, +0.34, +1.1%) said late Wednesday it signed a definitive agreement to buy Electronic Clearing House, a provider of electronic payment processing services. Under the terms of the deal, Intuit will pay $17 a share in cash for Electronic Clearing House, including shares issuable upon exercise of options, for a total of about $131 million on a fully diluted basis, according to Intuit. The two companies had signed a similar agreement in December 2006 but the parties mutually terminated that deal in March.

Do you suppose this will help or hurt our frequent problems will late or missing daily stock quotes in One Step Update?

RC

Reply to
R. C. White
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"R. C. White" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

Seems to me this purchase will not help at all. To me, stock quotes appear like something different from electronic payment services. In addition, Intit will need to integrate ECH into their own (Quicken, or whatever) bill pay systems and that will take manpower away from other Intuit "endeavors".

BTW, why are so many people that much hung up on Quicken quote servers? Seems to me that many news-related companies provide much better ticker services, albeit the free ones may be with a 20 min delay. Those (yahoo, bloomberg, NY Times) are not sufficient to keep people up to date? If you'd have to pay for up-to-the-minute quotes, wouldn't that be part of your "business/trading" expenses? Just curious ...

Reply to
Han

Hi, Han.

Thanks for pointing out the obvious - which I had overlooked. Check clearing does NOT mean stock quotes. Duh!

Daily quotes for MY stocks is a much-appreciated service. Of course I have many other sources of such quotes, but then I have to make the (slight) effort to get them and poke them into my Quicken portfolio screen. One Step Update is SO convenient - when it works - and so frustrating when it doesn't. I seldom get quotes more than once a day, after 4 PM my time (CST), after the market close.

And the daily news headlines for MY stocks were much appreciated, too. Those disappeared a few months ago and I miss them.

RC

Reply to
R. C. White

Have you tried Netstock (it's free). You can leave it running on your desktop and it will get prices at a frequency you choose. When you want to keep the prices (for Quicken), you can have Netstock export a comma delimited file which you can import directly into Quicken.

[The one caveat is that Netstock always outputs today's date in the delimited file prices ... and if you are using it on a weekend, or if you are using it before the current day's mutual fund prices are available, you'll get some incorrect prices.]
Reply to
John Pollard

News to me too, RC. Thanks.

Sorry, RC, I'm confused. Why should purchase of a company that is "a provider of electronic payment processing services" affect it one way or the other?

Reply to
Ken Blake

Never mind. I see you've already answered the question.

Reply to
Ken Blake

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