First Call Corp., a distributor of research reports, launched a new equity research service called Research Direct.
The company provides original equity research reports from contributing brokerage firms to institutional money managers. The new service will deliver the original documents, including associated charts and graphs. It is being beta-tested at 25 money management firms.
Institutional money managers are flooded daily with research reports, many of which are not relevant to their current interests or portfolio needs. But because the research may be valuable in the future, the reports are often stored or stacked somewhere, making retrieval of a specific piece of research difficult. This service allows users to search the data base by words or phrases, ticker symbol, company, broker or analyst name, industry, subject, country, or by their own customized stored searches.
The service is currently available on a dedicated terminal or desktop personal computer via a Windows-based local area network.
First Call, based in Boston, is jointly owned by Thomson Financial Services and several major brokerage firms that contribute their research to the network.
