Research Recap
Investment research is a business I know a bit about. Back in 1993, I was involved in seed funding a company called Multex that basically invented the idea of online distribution of investment research. Multex was a big success, went public, and was sold to Reuters earlier this decade. The team behind Multex is now doing another startup called Instant Information which I am an investor and board member of. They aren’t focused exclusively on Investment Research but they do some interesting things with it.
I also provided the initial venture capital money to TheStreet.com which I credit (Jim Cramer actually) with inventing the idea of blogging stocks and creating instant research.
The two are coming together. Is The Insider’s post about the iPhone price cut a blog post or investment research? It’s both actually.
So it makes sense that people are trying to merge blogs and investment research. Seeking Alpha‘s been doing that for a while. So has Blogging Stocks. So has Wallstrip. And many more stock bloggers who I’ve become friends with because of their blogs and mine.
The logical next step is to aggregate all that content and present it in a single place. Instant Information’s InfoNgen service can do that for you and if you are a serious investor, you should check it out.
Another of my portfolio companies (this one a Flatiron portfolio company), Alacra, has built a service called Research Recap which launched today. Here’s why Research Recap is worth trying.
1) its looks and feels like a blog.
2) you can subscribe to it via RSS
3) it aggregates a ton of blog content that is essentially investment research (search on apple and you’ll get The Insider’s post on the iPhone price cut)
4) the content’s not limited to stocks. it covers credit, investment, economic, market, academic and industry research, with tabs for each
5) you can subscribe via RSS to various categories of investment research
So if you care about the intersection of wall street and blogs, check out Research Recap. It’s in my blogroll now.
Comments (Archived):
do you get Lindsay with that too ?:-)
Is the longer term view of such a service to have the banks and independent research houses use it as a form of distribution? The blog research is nice but still not as comprehensive as what you can find from an i-banks research dept (that can be argued I suppose). And I’m fairly certain the banks wouldn’t want to de-centralize their content by adding to an RSS feed — it’d be viewed as commoditizing it. I guess I’m not sure I see the value of this outside a more focused product that anybody can already do with say, Google Reader.
you may find this academic paper interesting:Is All That Talk Just Noise? The Information Content of Internet Stock Message Boards (with Werner Antweiler) Journal of Finance 59(3) June (2004) pp 1259-1294. Cheers, Aviad
everything is noise to the person who doesn’t know how to use it.and you can never prove the guy who used it successfully wasn’t just lucky.summarizing the Buffett vs. EMH debate and a big chunk of the academic literature…
Just curious but when you say “I also provided the initial venture capital money to…” and “…I am an investor and board member…” is that you personally or your firm? Are you also an angel investor?
Hi Fred,Please correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Research Recap sounds pretty similar to SeekingAlpha?
research recap looks killer.
fred, while loving the design, these guys gotta be killin it earlier and faster with more…. was there early this morning and the new content was slim… c’mon guys, knock me down with fresh content well chosen and i’ll be there every morning, link to it and email links…
Research Recap includes many published forms of research including equity (Street) research, credit research, market, academic and economic research. It may also reference analysis from informal sources such as blogs, but that’s a modest portion of the coverage. If you click the tabs at the top of the site page, you can more easily see the content sources.While there are similarities to Seeking Alpha, the sites have a somewhat different approach. Seeking Alpha content is largely aggregated from blogs and financial newsletters. Most of the Research Recap posts are based upon the more formal types of research described above. The form and style of the posts will also differ. Seeking Alpha posts are typically focused on a given stock and are short posts; Research Recap posts often focus on more broad themes and the underlying content tend to be lengthy PDF files (some not available on the open web).I think readers would view the two sites as complementary (but would love to hear what you think).Any feedback – feel free to email us at editor-at-researchrecap-dot-com.-Barry Graubart, VP, Product Management, Alacra
The focus on stock specific analysis v broad themes and the formal v blog nature of the posts are sited as differences between Seeking Alpha and Research Recap. I don’t know if these differences are significant in the long run. On the formal research v blog style difference as Fred highlights in his post the line between blog posts and investment research is becoming increasing blurred. The audience for stock specific analysis and broad themes overlap; stock specific analysis requires an understanding of the broad themes.Both sites aggregate content and if the sites are viewed as complimentary do users need somebody to aggregate the aggregators?I think the service provided by both sites is valuable to users in terms of filtering the vast amount of information available online, grouping the data into relevant categories and providing a single channel for the informationDisclaimer: I occasionally submit blog posts to Seeking Alpha