Doing Efficient Market Research Online

Posted by Jeff Carter
on October 10th, 2012

The most obvious customers of data are trading firms and their traders. They pay thousands in fees a month for data. It’s a massive industry. Exchanges treat market data as a profit center. Bloomberg built an entire monolith business from synthesizing data. It’s pretty tough to go in any worthwhile trading room anywhere in the world and not find a Bloomberg terminal.

Damn things are tougher to type into than Egyptian hieroglyphics and they are super expensive monthly too!

But there are other consumers of data. Venture capitalists for example. They might not use services like Bloomberg because of the expense, but they pay for other services so they can engage in market research when they look and analyze companies. Private equity firms might be another consumer for the same reason. Pension funds and government run funds are other consumers.

There is a lot of free online research, but usually it’s worth what you pay. That’s what impressed me so much about Ycharts the first time I saw them. They had incredibly elegant graphs that I could manipulate thousands of ways to look at stocks and ETFs differently than I had before.

Since I first started working with them, they have only improved. They have added features, economic indicators and more comparison tools. They rolled out Ycharts Pro over a year ago. This week, they are releasing a new product, Ycharts Platinum. It looks really amazing to me and if you are using really expensive data services you ought to give it a spin.

Here is what one writer said about it.

The new platform provides approximately 100,000 economic indicators and about 900 metrics per individual company — compared to around 90 currently available to YCharts Pro Gold-level subscribers — comprising more advanced calculations and specialized metrics requested by current professional users, as well as calculations for different time horizons, including annual and quarterly figures and year-over-year growth rates.

Platinum-level users can also export any data from YCharts — including fundamental data and economic indicators — into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for use in financial models, such as for comparative analysis and valuations. The platform includes pre-built templates for the typical types of analysis used by wealth managers, registered investment advisors, hedge funds and venture capital firms. Alternately, clients can use the platform’s “export center” to configure what data points they want for which companies, or can connect to the vendor’s API to pull in the data they require.

They are doing some groundbreaking things at Ycharts. If you are an institutional investor, a VC, a PE firm, even a pro day trader at home or in a trading room, check them out. My bet is that you will be able to look at individual stocks and ETFs in a better way than you did before. Ycharts is a valuable tool that allows you to make better decisions.

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The information in this blog post represents my own opinions and does not contain a recommendation for any particular security or investment. I or my affiliates may hold positions or other interests in securities mentioned in the Blog, please see my Disclaimer page for my full disclaimer.