This month in our ‘Meet the Players’ series we take a look at a financial website – Investegate, a part of the Financial Express Group.

Many of our readers will already be familiar with the www.investegate.co.uk website. The site is one of the most popular sources of Regulatory News Service (RNS) information for private investors and market professionals. Aimzine readers may have noticed that we frequently provide links to news stories provided by Investegate. In this article we find that there is a lot more to the Investegate product than many realise. We also find out some fascinating information about the site and its usage.

Investegate

The website first appeared in 1996 as ‘UK Wire’ which was a simple site providing users with a news feed of UK company announcements. I spoke to Mike Jones, Publishing Director of Financial Express, and he explained that his company was able to launch the UK Wire site as a free site because the costs involved were relatively low. Financial Express’s major site is ‘Trustnet’ which provides data and research on Unit Trusts, Investment Trusts and other funds. UK Wire was launched a year after Trustnet and uses some of the same feeds as the Trustnet site.

In 2007 the UK Wire site was re-launched as ‘Investegate’. The simple concept for news feeds was retained but some topical journalistic content was added to the site to provide more background information for readers. Mike Jones explained the rationale behind the re-launch: ‘The change was to give some context to the announcements and provide ideas to our readers beyond individual announcements, allowing them to view cross sections of information by sector, directors dealings, executive changes, dividends proposed, general corporate activity, as well as highlighting the most read announcements on the day. The changes have also enabled more interaction with readers as we now have an in-house editorial team in place adding daily articles’.

Today the Investegate site employs around 15 people whilst the Financial Express Group totals some 200 employees worldwide. Most of the revenue for Investegate comes from advertising on the website with further revenue being generated by providing ‘white label’ data for company websites.

Users and Usage

The Investegate website has seen a 30% increase in usage in the last 6 months with 130,000 users and 2.1 million page impressions now being recorded each month. Mike Jones puts the increase down to private investors researching shares which are at historically low prices in the current weak markets.

Over half of Investegate’s users are private investors with market professionals (bankers, traders, solicitors/trustees) being the next largest category at around 17%. Mike says that many professionals use their relatively simple site in preference to some high profile news and information providers.

I always start my day at around 7am with a cup of tea and a read through the day’s company news items on Investegate. It would seem that I am not the only one doing this. As the chart to the right shows the 7am to 8am hour is the site’s busiest hour.

Issues

Users of Investegate may have noticed below average performance at times recently. Mike explained that they have had a problem coping with the rapid increase in usage in recent months. However, he expects the problems to be resolved early in March when there will be a major upgrade to the system’s hardware facilities.

Investegate is a straightforward news site and not normally prone to problems. Just occasionally there has been a problem when one of the many news feeds is not available when these open at 7am. Such issues are outside of the direct control of Financial Express.

Facilities

The Investegate site provides company news information from several providers including:-

• Regulatory News Service (RNS)
• Marketwire
• BusinessWire
• PR Newswire
• Hugin
• Cision

These feeds can be displayed per Company with a history going back several years. Additionally there is a facility to monitor market news items as they are issued during the day.  This Alerts facility enables users to monitor a large number of companies. Within a minute or so of an announcement being issued the news item is displayed on the users PC. 

In addition to the online Alerts service there is an Email alerts service which enables investors to monitor news items for their portfolio. We use this facility at Aimzine to help us to follow progress with our Featured Companies.

Aimzine Comment

We are regular users of the Investegate site and we recommend the Online Alerts and Email facilities.  Over the coming months we will be looking at some more investor websites. In the meantime we would be very interested in readers views on the Investegate site and their preferences for retrieving company news from the internet.

the investigate

website has seen a

30% increase in

usage over the

last 6 months

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Written by Michael Crockett

Copyright Aimzine Ltd

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