|
Enabled informed stock investing across Asia.
Independent equities research portal KLSETracker.com operated by I&J Information Services in Petaling Jaya, went regional with a name change to Equities-Tracker.com, www.equitiestracker.com.
It’s currently constructing a research portal, ASXTracker.com for Australia, which will be ready by the end of the year, with plans for another portal for Singapore later on.
The brainchild of I&J director and software consultant, Jimmy Vong, EquitiesTracker.com is an online resource aimed at professional traders, fund houses, banks, insurance companies and quality investors wanting to analyse the fundamentals behind the counters they’re interested in investing in. Jimmy credits his colleague Ean Cheah as the main force behind developing the Tracker.
“EquitiesTracker.com provides investors with historical data about each counter’s market performance and provides them with in-depth analyses of each counter,” said I&J technical director Santo Chong.
Its left sidebar contains links to free information, such as the featured company, end-of-day price and volume, daily stock market indices updated at 6.30pm, a more detailed picture of the overall market, key indices, the top 20 most active counters, top 10 gainers and top 10 losers, and links to I&J’s information, technology and media partners’ websites.
The centre contains charts of market indices and the KL Composite Index powered by ChartNexus. Below it are I&J’s summaries of announcements by companies with links to more detailed tables, charts, news archives, top 30 shareholders, company background and so on. “Some company announcements reports are 10 pages long but we condense it to one or two paragraphs,” said Alvin.
Also included are reports by newspapers and others, the daily CI-100 tracking review of the 100 companies that make up the composite index (CI). EquitiesTracker.com conducts daily reviews of the CI and writes analyses and commentaries about companies, articles on market sectors and so on.
“However, as an independent market information and analysis provider, we don’t advise people on which counter to buy and neither are we a stock trading portal,” said business development manager, Alvin Vong, Jimmy’s son.
The right-hand sidebar contains all the tools for researchers to study the market, including search for stocks, tools for picking stocks according to market price ratios, accounting key performance indicators, e-mail alerts of up to five selected company’s announcements and financial reports, IPO reviews, financial histories and other tools.
Tracking EquitiesTracker.com
An accountant by profession, Jimmy manually collected data on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange since 1989. Being a small time market investor, he wanted to know a lot more about the stocks he was buying. Using its own locally developed, characterbased Intelligen rapid application development engine which ran on PCs, I&J was able to digitise market data to some extent and supplied market data analyses to The Star and Business Times.
“Construction of KLSETracker.com began in 1996, with the offline databases being created using Intelligen and our big break came when British scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989,” said Jimmy.
“That provided us with the opportunity to launch an Internet portal,” Jimmy added.
A basic version of KLSETracker went live in early 2000 and was available online to the public for free until 2004. Today I&J charges RM30 monthly subscription or RM360 per year, payable online by credit card or bank transfer.
“In 2004, our serious competition came mostly from brokers who had millions of ringgit to develop webbased trading platforms and market information archives. We especially feared Star Publications’s online stock portal, which was very well funded but Star exited the stock portal business in 2004,” said Jimmy.
“That year, we finally convinced TA Securities to be the first customer for our archival data and other brokers soon followed as they found it cheaper
to have the archives and development of stock analysis tools outsourced to third-parties like us and in March 2008 we changed our name to EquitiesTracker.com, so we can cover markets across the region.
“Overall, we’re happy to see a growing proportion of sophisticated investors in Malaysia. We’ve been helped by our partner Grandpine Capital which focuses on the Mandarin-speaking market and ChartNexus which combines our financial data with their charting expertise to educate investors. Several private universities have expressed interest in using our educational resources for using financial information in their application of value-investing, which is a major growth area for stock investors in Malaysia,” Jimmy added.
Today, EquitiesTracker’s customers include over 2,000 individual subscribers, seven local brokers and three international data aggregators.
Add This  |
