CORRECTION: General Atlantic Partners Holds 25% of All Shares Outstanding

SORRY FOR THE CONFUSION - I'VE EDITED THIS POST FOR ACCURACY
General Atlantic Partners holds 10,380,000 shares of AX (click here to view that position: http://tinyurl.com/3om2r. That's a mighty significant position considering that AX has only 11,000,000 shares on the float and there's only 41.14 million shares outstanding. William Ford, a partner with General Atlantic Partners, has a seat on the Archipelago Board of Directors. He was interviewed by TheStreet.com in 6/2000 - you can read that interview here: http://tinyurl.com/6pq8d. And to get a sense of how successful General Atlantic has been just consider that they turned a $14mm investment in e*trade into approximately $500mm in a few short years. They were one of e*trade's earliest believers.

A couple interesting take-aways from this interview is 1) His discussion of what a poor job Goldman Sachs does in the aftermarket for firms it underwrites, and 2) How General Atlantic Partners goes about realizing a profit by selling slowly so not to damage a company's stock. During the last couple of days we've seen Jeffries executing a significant portion of the volume.

Yesterday, for example they crossed 17,000 shares in the third market when only around 20,000 shares had traded (in the morning, shortly after the open). And, last Friday, they handled over 120,000 shares of the volume. It seems possible that Jeffries was (and still may be) handling a big (read: whopping!) order from General Atlantic Partners. In fact in the aforementioned interview, Ford alludes to the incestuous nature of institutional investing.

Jeffries and General Atlantic Partners certainly are familiar with each other, and in fact, Jeffries' Vice Chairman, Robert Lessin sits on the Marketwatch.com board along with a General Atlantic Partners' partner, David Hodgson (see info about that here [4th bullet point down]: http://tinyurl.com/4ltm2). It would not be surprising to see General Atlantic take some of their tremendous profit in AX off the table after more than doubling it in short order.