by Calculated Risk on 10/17/2007 05:54:00 PM

From MarketWatch: Mortgage meltdown leads E-Trade to $58 million loss

"A lot of people think that sub-prime loans is where the problems center," [Jarrett Lilien, E-Trade's president] said. "But that's not our problem. Our issue is that the value of high quality loans is underperforming."

E-Trade says its issues in the quarter were with home equity lines and home installment loans. "That's where we're seeing worse performance," Lilien said.
...
E-Trade also wrote down about $200 million in asset-backed securities. "That pretty much took the most risky types of assets off the table," Lilien said.

And from the conference call (hat tip Brian):

“ As a part of our guidance release last month, with respect to securities impairments, we forecasted we could see up to $100 million in the second half of 2007 and an additional 50 to 100 million in 2008 for a total of up to $200 million over six quarters. These impairments were primarily related to two categories within our asset backed securities portfolio which we identified to have the highest risk. Specifically, these were collateralized debt obligations or CDOs, and securities collateralized by second lien mortgages. Since the September guidance release, upon evaluation and refinement of our forecast, we determine that had certain writedowns needed to be taken in the third quarter. Additionally, we decided to accelerate the sale of the highest risk portions of these portfolios, writing down securities rated lower than double A by more than an average of $0.50 on the dollar. By changing the intent and designation to no longer hold these securities to recovery. The combined effect is that we recorded an impairment charge of approximately $197 million in the third quarter” emphasis added

Note that they haven't yet sold the CDOs and the 2nd lien RMBS'; they just moved them from "held to maturity" portfolio to "available for sale".