It’s a quaint tale in hindsight: A big hedge fund/quasi-investment bank swoops in to bail out an ailing online brokerage in hopes of turning it into a profit-churning dynamo.
That’s what happened in No-vember 2007, when Chicago-based Citadel Investment Group came to the rescue of E*Trade Financial, which was collapsing under the weight of mortgage-related losses in a $3 billion asset-backed securities portfolio.
