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A Growing Interest for Euro Research

The single currency for European financial markets has sparked demand for new research sources and historical databases that fund managers can use to analyze pan-European securities.

a euro bond service for traders

While both Investext and OneSource are heavily weighted toward equities, one service that concentrates on fixed income - particularly the euro - is Eurobond Online (www.eurobondonline.com/), a free, Web-based service that offers reports, analysis, trading strategies and charts specific to seven countries, including the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan and the Euroland block of nations.

Though the service has been available for over a year, its name was changed in December 1998 to better reflect its concentration on euro trading strategies. The service, run by Jack Rhoades, a euro and treasuries trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, features research into instruments he is trading and his specific strategies. The service offers data on and strategies for trading cash, futures, options and bonds. It also offers 1,000 pages of charts, which are updated daily.

"I look at different risk strategies and put some of my opinions on the site," says Rhoades.

Rhoades says users of his service tend to be interest rate swaps traders and firms trading in the capital markets. The service is free, he explains, because he cannot figure out a way to charge people for using the site.

"I'm trying to build up a reputation with different people," he says. "I haven't found it easy to sell it because not many people know about me. I don't have a big corporate name."

Eurobond Online wants to make it easy for traders to quickly find relevant information, Rhoades says. To that end, his site offers a Global Strategy feature that with one click of a button, enables users to download Rhoades' strategies on a particular market or instrument. Rhoades also says that soon, Eurobond Online will be adding coverage of stocks and cash treasuries.

pre-trade research

While Eurobond Online is clearly aimed at active traders who know what they want to trade - and presumably have already done much of the their own research - those looking to do pre-trade research could do better taking a look into Datastream/ICV and Disclosure/Worldscope. Both services are owned by Primark, the Waltham, Mass.-based global information provider.

For money managers looking to research bonds and derivatives as well as equities, there's Datastream/ICV (www.datastream.com), which features historical equities data on more than 30,000 stocks. The service also offers data and analysis on more than 70,000 domestic and international bonds. In the U.K., Datastream offers a Web-based, real-time news, data and research service called Market Eye (www.market-eye.co.uk).

Disclosure offers the Worldscope service (www.disclosure.com), which the company says is aimed at analysts and money managers who want to compare research and analysis across borders, as well as within borders. Worldscope features historical data on 15,000 public companies going back 18 years, emerging markets research on 3,000 companies in 25 countries, earnings estimates from I/B/E/S, company profiles and fundamentals. The service boasts coverage of 2,000 companies within the Euroland countries and is available on the Web through Disclosure's Global Access service and on CD-ROM.

While investment managers and analysts clearly have an array of euro-oriented equity databases to pick from, there's still a dearth of fixed-income category services, other than what's provided by credit rating agencies for government bonds. But if the anticipated boom in corporate bond issuance materializes in the private sector, then fund managers and traders will need Euroland databases for fixed income, as well as futures.

Having seen the writing on the wall, Eurobond Online's Rhoades says he wants to get into the research game as well.

"Most of the world's futures markets will soon be electronic," he says. "I'm gearing up to offer a lot more research. . . . to be a comprehensive information source."

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