Update: Market swings lift E*Trade

E*Trade (ETFC) rose in early trading Wednesday after the online broker took another modest step toward recovery. The New York-based company said daily average trades in January rose 22 percent from a year ago, to 212,000, as traders jumped into a volatile market. While a wild market is good for trading, last month’s stock market declines depleted investors’ accounts, trimming the size of E*Trade’s client asset base. E*Trade said retail client assets dropped 12 percent from a year earlier, to $174 billion, reflecting the steep decline in many stocks, though client cash balances remained stable at $33.6 billion. “We view January’s performance as evidence that our turnaround plan is gaining traction and we’re building momentum on all fronts,” CEO Jarrett Lilien said in a press release.

E*Trade also added 16,000 net new retail accounts in January. While those gains pushed the company’s end-of-period account rolls up 0.3 percent from a month ago, they show that E*Trade was adding just over 500 net accounts daily during the month - just half of the thousand daily account openings the company pointed to in its popular Super Bowl ads. Update: The company notes that January’s gains mark a turn from the customer defections suffered in November and December, and says it saw a “32% increase in newly opened and funded brokerage accounts the week following the Super Bowl.”

So while E*Trade users have shown substantial loyalty in sticking with the company through last fall’s financing crisis, fans will be hoping the company can maintain its post-Super Bowl account-opening pace - and keep its stock on a roll.