An unusual seminar last month as ShareSoc unveiled two companies, 1PM and ImmuPharma, alongside a presentation from a new investor research service and a pair of ShareSoc talks on areas where the organisation is hoping to influence policy.
Research Tree
As a private investor it often feels, to me, that the playing field is far from level; institutional investors benefit from high-grade research, privileged access to share placings and the chance to invest with someone else's money. Research Tree is a very recently launched service (5 weeks now) that seeks to redress at least one of these problems by providing real-time access to broker notes and other investment research. For a moderate monthly fee (£40 or around the cost of one decent trade) the CEO, Rob Mundy, explained how research covering most of the FTSE100 and more than half of the FTSE250 and AIM could be accessed by private investors.
Interestingly Rob didn't give us the hard sell but there is a caveat to this service beyond the cost; you have to be what's called an Elective Professional. In practice this means that you declare yourself to meet two out of these three criteria: you have €500K of investable funds; you work or have worked in the financial sector; you trade more than 10 times in a quarter and have done for 4 quarters. As a regulated entity Research Tree must verify a sample of these claims (1 in 20 perhaps) but there's nothing to stop you signing up for a 2-day free trial. The only problem is that you have to provide credit card details to start the trial and it's unclear if the fee is taken immediately.
Nevertheless in the interests of research I've signed up and I have to admit that the site is pretty slick. It took perhaps 5 minutes to enter all of my holdings and instantly I have 131 research reports (from 19 providers) at my fingertips (out of a total of 8000) and the ones that I've looked at are pretty good. Obviously the research houses aren't charities and the attraction for them is a scalable royalty being paid by Research Tree based on the number of views - which means that readers can reward quality content as well as rate individual reports (out of 5 stars). So I'm pleasantly surprised by the quality of this service already and it's clear that…
