The world wide investing web: Efficient financial research on the internet

1:00-1:30 – The web now has such a central role in processing information that it would be a critical failure for investors to consider the Internet as a last resource for financial research information.

1:30 – If your competitor is using the Internet for breaking research and you are not, then you're left behind. There are many examples of news items that break online first.

2:40 – Management turnover is one thing that you can detect online, product releases represent another area. With online information, you can spot trends to see how products are received and learn about unannounced management movements.

3:50 - You can split internet-derived research into two categories: Things of general interest such as management turnover and things of particular interest such as the way a product is being received regionally.

5:00 – Of course investors can create a filter in Google and construct complicated equations to produce meaningful searches, but often the result is limited to a particular set of sources without a lot of context.  Many users also complain that they receive many duplicate stories.

5:40 – In FirstRain, users can write keyword equations and the system will also suggest related searches based on those terms.

6:20-7:00 – The user interface of FirstRain is designed to be so simple that it requires no training. It also tries to take care of the volume of information so that you do not receive thousands or hundreds of results. Results are ranked according to interest and applicable amount.

8:00 – Many tools that currently let you filter the internet, including FirstRain, are focused on single-company research.  It has proved more difficult to capture sector- or industry-wide information. You can search by industry in FirstRain, but it’s usually a tool used for single company research.

9:10 – Is there value in watching blogs? Some would suggest that the bloggers aren’t as savvy as analysts. But there are many non-traditional analysts such as pundits, journalists, former journalists. There are also employees and former employees who know the company from the inside.

9:50 – There is so much information being added to the internet so often that you cannot afford to miss it, but you really need the context around the information as well, which is what search engines can fail to deliver.

10:20 – Two types of investors typically seek to capture internet-based research – Portfolio Managers who read information and search results only a few times throughout the day or the research analysts themselves who are reading the results continuously.