When Euromoney approached Multex, a highly regarded equity research and estimates platform, and asked it to take part in this year’s internet awards, at first it was keen. Then it realized that First Call Analyst was also in the running, and it pulled out.
The marketing representative for Multex explained: “The guy who was supposed to show you the site is really worried. We’re just not ready to show you it yet. We know it’s not as good as what Thomson has. But we’re working on it – we have a new version coming out soon.”
So Euromoney, and, more important, clients, will have to wait for that new version. In the meantime, Thomson First Call Analyst is comfortably the best site of its kind.
The site itself is not so much a single product as a collection of individual research and estimates products, all knitted together into one integrated platform. Each tool has its own niche, so I/B/E/S compiles consensus estimates, Datastream feeds pricing data, Worldscope offers fundamentals figures, and so on. These products have all been bought by Thomson Financial and built into the platform, which has been in its current form since June 2002.
Most other research sites work by, for example, taking a company, and then listing all the relevant research pieces next to it. From there, users can find out whether the analyst is bullish or bearish on that stock. First Call Analyst is slightly different.
In a typical example, an investor could look at, say, an IBM page, and rather than just listing or sorting relevant research on that stock, the page displays fundamentals, and consensus broker forecasts, among other things.
From any section, users can drill down for more information. So in the broker forecasts section, users can break it down into individual brokers. All of these pages are customizable, so clients can select brokers whose research they do or don’t want to see, which is useful for a site with more than 700 contributors.
The upshot of this is that site users can assess which firms or analysts are bullish and bearish and then examine the supporting research, rather than having to read the research to find the key information they want.
The site also accommodates buy-side research by enabling investors to load their in-house material into the same company pages that the usual sell-side research appears on.
The search page works along the same lines as the rest of the site, in that users can, if they like, look for a particular company, but they can also go about it the other way by requesting lists of companies with a particular EBITDA.
So while the site pools and mingles equity research (and indeed credit research) and enables users to filter and search through that research, that is by no means all it does. In fact it has many more features than can be adequately explained here. The end result is a site that gives fund managers pretty much all they need to know to make an investment decision.
Themarkets.com offers very close competition to First Call Analyst, and to an extent pursues a slightly different client base. It is an excellent site, and probably a better option for investors who are looking for a more basic platform for equities research from the leading firms.
