Recently I was asked to demo products concerning handling the vast amount of broker research our analysts get and also allow the ability to evaluate brokers for the content and recommendations that they provide.
During my preliminary research I demoed two products YouDevise and FirstCoverage. After the demos I was convinced that the best of these two products was YouDevise. While the products offered the same features my preference for YouDevise boiled down to two reasons.....
1.) YouDevise is free to Buy-Side firms while charging Sell-Side firms while FirstCoverage charges the Buy-Side and provides the technology free to the Sell-Side. Although FirstCoverage price is very affordable why pay for a very similar service when you don't have to. The way it was explained to me by YouDevise is that it only makes since that you would charge the Sell-Side considering that by the Buy-Side using the product they will be rewarded for the results of their research.
2.) A more customizable, friendly user interface. During my demo and free trial of FirstCoverage it became very apparent that it was difficult to get around and the amount of information provided was mind boggling. I felt this was a sharp contrast to YouDevise which I felt was much easier to navigate and get around. I also felt that YouDevise was more focused on allowing you to customize the information that you can sort by which I felt would be very beneficial to the way we trade.
The one draw-back that I could find when it came to You-Devise was the fact that the company is based in the United Kingdom. Due to this fact they do not have established relationships with all the US Research houses. According the gentleman who gave the demo they have had no trouble implementing the system in the brokers that they have dealt with in the states though.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Enterprise 2.0 Conference
Recently our company presented at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and our Socialtext wiki experience. For notes on our presentation go to http://www.enterprise2conf.com/2007/presentations/conference/ea04-herrmann.pdf For the rest of the presentations presented at the conference go to http://www.enterprise2conf.com/2007/presentations/index.php.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Tamale
http://www.tamalerms.com/
Tamale is a product dedicated to the collection, maintenance, and categorization of research for buy-side firms. It is a server based product that integrates with just about everything that an analyst would use to perform research about a ticker or investment theme (IE, Adobe, Email etc.). The user interface looks exactly like an Outlook mailbox and works similarly in that things are saved in Folders that can be created based on categories that you can define.
A user example.....
Lets say for instance during the course of research an analyst finds a piece of research that they think may be relevant in Reuters Knowledge. All they would have to is simply click on the button that is installed on their local Adobe to send it to the Tamale Server. You can then tag the information based on the ticker or investment theme that the content is related to.
Another reason I looked at this product was for the capability to reduce and better utilize the research that is sent to our analysts via email. Ryan Mackey, who gave the demo ran through the scenario where things are mailed to the server and then automatically scanned by the system and categorized based on the content of the Email. With the email in the system, it is categorized and fully searchable so that analysts can look at investment ideas from the Sell-Side analysts at their own leisure or when they it is applicable.
What was also interesting about Tamale was the ability to take things right off the internet and save it to the system. That way if you find a news story that you think might be of interest you can simply highlight the content you want saved, hit the system button on the top of your browser and send it to the system while tagging it. It is similar to creating an email and sending it to other members of your research departmet except that it is automatically categorized by the system and is searchable at any time.
This is a product that I am going to recommend to my research department.
Tamale is a product dedicated to the collection, maintenance, and categorization of research for buy-side firms. It is a server based product that integrates with just about everything that an analyst would use to perform research about a ticker or investment theme (IE, Adobe, Email etc.). The user interface looks exactly like an Outlook mailbox and works similarly in that things are saved in Folders that can be created based on categories that you can define.
A user example.....
Lets say for instance during the course of research an analyst finds a piece of research that they think may be relevant in Reuters Knowledge. All they would have to is simply click on the button that is installed on their local Adobe to send it to the Tamale Server. You can then tag the information based on the ticker or investment theme that the content is related to.
Another reason I looked at this product was for the capability to reduce and better utilize the research that is sent to our analysts via email. Ryan Mackey, who gave the demo ran through the scenario where things are mailed to the server and then automatically scanned by the system and categorized based on the content of the Email. With the email in the system, it is categorized and fully searchable so that analysts can look at investment ideas from the Sell-Side analysts at their own leisure or when they it is applicable.
What was also interesting about Tamale was the ability to take things right off the internet and save it to the system. That way if you find a news story that you think might be of interest you can simply highlight the content you want saved, hit the system button on the top of your browser and send it to the system while tagging it. It is similar to creating an email and sending it to other members of your research departmet except that it is automatically categorized by the system and is searchable at any time.
This is a product that I am going to recommend to my research department.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Buy-Side 2.0
With all the products related to investment research and companies offering the latest product to transform the investment research process I thought I would create a blog dedicated to my personal evaluation of these products and hopefully gather insight from others who have had experience with these products. I look forward to the opportunity to hear from other people involved in the investment community and hopefully we can jointly improve our efficiency with the research process!
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