Product Watch

Thomson Financial is ramping up a new broad-based research tool for institutional investors.

First Call Analyst combines client data with real-time info from Thomson and other third parties. It's the first component of Thomson's Dashboard, which will combine a number of investment tools into one interface, explains Nick Pastoressa, Thomson's senior vice president of product development in New York.

First Call Analyst includes sophisticated investment tools, including advanced charting, portfolio analytics and stock filters, which allow institutional investors to analyze data and export it to Microsoft Excel.

Among the content that will be available via First Call Analyst are real-time earning estimates, broker-research reports, fixed-income research, morning notes, historical data, news, the users' Portia-portfolio holdings and analyst forecasts on things like revenues, cash flow and net debt.

One of the key features is that the system commingles the user's in-house estimates with the sell side.

Pastoressa, says "First Call Analyst was designed to take advantage of the trend in which buy-side firms build up their own research capabilities in addition to using sell-side research, allowing users to import a firm's proprietary research and information into the product."

The system is being tested with a group of institutional investors and will be rolled out in January 2002. For more information: www.firstcall.com; 646-822-2916.

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Editor's Note:

The Trade Order Management Product Functionality Chart that was published with the December issue of WS&T had an error on the Product Name & Description for OM. The company product name & description should read as follows:

Product Name & Description: OneWorld Order ManagementOneWorld Order Management is an automated trade capture, trade management and real-time order processing system for retail and institutional brokers. It provides extensive order management, order routing, and compliance functionality along with the ability to generate, publish and track Indications of Interest. The system handles pre- and post-trade compliance, provides direct electronic connections to exchanges and supports FIX and other interfaces. With seamless processing of customer business from order receipt through execution notification, OneWorld Order Management automates order flow, eliminates paper trading, reduces errors and improves client service. Offered as an in-house or ASP solution, OneWorld Order Management is a modular, scalable system for large and small firms alike.

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Slash Fulfillment Prospectus Costs

NewRiver, Inc., which provides e-services to the financial-services industry, has added a print-on-demand (POD) service to Prospectus Express, its electronic-delivery service.

The service is an alternative to warehouse-fulfillment operations and blends the Web with POD technologies to allow firms to provide investors with information electronically or via mail on a need to know basis, says Larry Renfro, chairman and CEO of NewRiver, which is based in Andover, Mass.

Renfro says North American firms spend $10 billion per year in warehouse fulfillment costs and this service could slash that by 50 percent . It "offers dramatic savings for financial companies, as well as opportunities for improved customer service."

Prospectus Express delivers information directly from NewRiver's XML database, which draws directly from the SEC's EDGAR database. For more information: www.newriver.com; 800-481-2331.

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ECN Data Services

MidnightTrader, Inc. has launched two new services designed to provide insight into extended-hours trading for retail and institutional investors.

The MidnightTrader News Service (MTNS), designed for retail investors, provides news, analysis and data services geared to activity on ECNs. That includes aggregating ECN-trading data and combining it with news that impacts stocks in the after-hours market, such as earnings announcements and warnings, merger and acquisition activity, technical analysis, conference calls and analyst actions.

TradeMap, a joint initiative between Midnight and WebMap Technologies, Inc. is an investment-management-information system that focuses on ECNs. It graphically presents ECN-specific news and data so that institutional investors get a real-time consolidated view of the market.

"Extended-hours trading is the next frontier of high-volume growth for the equities exchanges and retail brokerages," says Brooks McFeely, CEO of MidnightTrader.

McFeely says that 90 percent of announcements that move markets are made after hours, prompting trading on ECNs that can impact market price. For example, in August, Ciena shares dropped 24 percent in extended-hour trading, while Priceline.com recently rose 21 percent in the after-hours market.

Trading volume in the after-hours market averages 70 million shares per day, comparable to Nasdaq's daily trading volume in 1983. Moreover, ECNs now process 43 percent of all Nasdaq trades and 5 percent of NYSE trades.

Financial service companies, he says, must "offer their retail customers visibility into this extended-hours marketplace to help mitigate portfolio risk and enable investors to capitalize on these opportunities."

The MTNS is currently distributed by COMTEX, NewsWare DTN and FinancialContent.com. Coverage can be customized based on after-hours or full-day coverage or limited to specific ECNs. It can be delivered through a real-time proprietary news engine, through customized applications, via wireless devices or through feed formats, including XML and FTP.

For more information contact: www.midnighttrader.com; 207-831-5623.

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Morningstar Opens Fund Database

Asset managers looking to keep tabs on their competitors have a new online tool from the data-services group of Chicago-based Morningstar, Inc. DataLab provides access to Morningstar's historical-fund database and was designed specifically for asset managers, consultants and investment professionals, says Don Phillips, Morningstar's managing director.

Phillips says "For the first time, we are taking our customized fund data a huge step further by offering fund companies and other institutions unparalleled access to our proprietary database, which can be used for customized research, competitive surveillance and product development."

Using DataLab, investment professionals can analyze a variety of performance measures, such as trailing total returns, tax efficiency, fees, expenses, sector weightings and standard deviation on a range of funds.

The historical database is exportable and can be searched to allow users to identify trends. Users can conduct time-period calculations, check investment styles and see the complete portfolio holdings of the funds they're researching.

DataLab allows asset managers to create blended benchmarks and user-defined peer groups among mutual funds. They can also create a variety of reports, covering things like rolling performance, peer-group-portfolio analysis or sectors.

It's accessible 24 hours through a high speed Internet connection and the data is refreshed daily or monthly.

Phillips says the new offering means asset managers will be able to dig deeper into their own performance and make meaningful comparisons. For more information: www.morningstar.com; 888-736-0780.