Specifications
QuoteMedia's investor relations product provides publicly traded companies with a platform that dynamically updates IR related data including financial statements, analyst reports, earning estimates, stock quotes, company news, charts, filings, insider reports, historical quotes, and more.
Cost
Average cost starts between $400 and $500 per month.
Ownership
Publicly traded.
User
Blake Young, IR manager at Union Pacific Corporation, has used QuoteMedia for about a 18 months. Union Pacific has been using it since 2008.
How do you use it?
Initially, QuoteMedia sends an email with a link you click to create an icon on your desktop. I click the icon, log on, and it launches the program.
There's an app for BlackBerry but there's also a Web-based tool that lets you save to favorites so you can use it on any mobile device.
You can customize what's displayed on the screen. I've entered our stock symbol, symbols for all competing railroads, and all indexes. You can do whatever you want with the information. Generally, we're monitoring stock prices throughout the day. There's also a module that shows news stories, which are basically press releases, and SEC filings. It pulls in information for any stocks symbols you've entered.
You can also chart stock performance over time – one year, five years, 10 years, whatever you want – and you can compare it to other stocks.
We have about 12 QuoteMedia licenses, so if anyone internally has a problem they contact me first and I go through a few troubleshooting things with them – like rebooting and clearing out the Java cache. If that doesn't work, I call the QuoteMedia helpline. If it's not urgent, I've also used the email contact button. Even if QuoteMedia is having issues on its end, I've been very pleased with how quickly customer service responds.
How does it serve your business needs?
It's a way to keep tabs on what's happening in the stock market for us and our competitors at any point throughout the day.
Members of our IR department, treasury department, and all C-level executives use it. We also have a couple of users in our HR group.
From an IR perspective, so much of what we do is related to the stock price. We measure our performance based on whether the full value of our business is reflected in the market.
In mid-September, another company came out with a pre-announcement before earnings. QuoteMedia isn't the only source of information we use, but if I'm just looking at my QuoteMedia news feed, I can see a press release has been issued and read it. This pre-announcement was a very negative thing, and I could see how the stock reacted. It wasn't just affecting one company – all railroad stocks were down by different magnitudes.
It helps us see how markets are doing in general and how railroad stocks are playing into that. If all the railroad stocks are down and the rest of market is up, it could be indicator that perhaps we've missed a news story or something that's driving the difference in performance. So QuoteMedia is a first line of what's happening in the market, and I can go from there if I need to dig deeper.
We also use it on our IR website – we have a daily graph that shows the stock price and quote at any given point during the day, as well as historical stock price information.
How does it integrate with your existing infrastructure from and IT standpoint?
The main interface is a Java-based application, so it's compatible with anything. We've had no issues at all with compatibility.
The stock prices we put on our IR website are easy plug-in modules. QuoteMedia gave our Web design team the code and they just plugged it in.
What are the main benefits?
It's reliable and incredibly affordable compared to the alternatives like a Bloomberg Terminal or FactSet license. We do have a Bloomberg Terminal subscription, but it's not practical to have everyone in the company who needs to see our intra-day stock price use that one Bloomberg Terminal, and adding additional subscriptions can be expensive.
It's highly customizable and flexible. You can choose from probably a dozen things you want to display, decide where you want them on the page, and how big you want them. Everyone sets their screen up a little differently depending on their preferences.
The interface, graphics, colors, charts are all color coded, and you can change the look and feel of some of it as well.
Customer service is outstanding – both on the technical side and on the account representative side.
We can access it from mobile devices.
What are the main drawbacks?
We haven't really had any real issues, and I can't think of any real drawbacks. We have other resources for 1% or 2% of people in the company who need really in-depth data, but for the vast majority of users QuoteMedia's product is more than sufficient.
What would you like to see improved / added?
Most of the time, if there was anything I've thought was missing they've been able to help us with it. For example, I called my rep because wanted to download the values behind the line chart, and we didn't have a button to do that. Literally, the next day the button showed up on our screens.
The news feed could potentially be improved. Right now it basically picks up press releases and SEC filings rather than news articles from outside sources that mention the stocks you're watching.
Competitors
Interactive Data Corporation: offers Web-based customized financial information systems that can integrate global financial information and proprietary content.
Thompson Reuters: develops, hosts, and maintains IR websites.
