Monitor 110 brings blog intelligence to Wall Street

By Richard Koman - September 21, 2006

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Blog watching meets Wall Street with Monitor110, an aggregator and filter for some 40 million information sources, due to launch early next year, the FT reports. It's aimed exclusively at hedge funds currently, and is currently being tested by 10 funds. Its' being run by Roger Ehrenberg, former head of Deutsche Bank's hedge funds operations.

The platform is similar to the data portals that investors are used to, but the difference is that it tickers the unstructured universe.

Mr Ehrenberg said the platform in time could lend itself to trading strategies dependent on computer-driven models feeding off measures of online activity. However, analysts expressed fears that these strategies could be vulnerable to spammers.

At TechCrunch, Marshall Kirkpatrick is going ga-ga over Monitor 110:

Monitor110 gathers information from 40 million sources of various types (100 million by the end of next year they say), ranked by financial market knowledge through a proprietary algorithm that takes 50 factors into account - inbound links being just one reputation metric. Users can chose between top sources preselected for their market sector, and subscribe to sources of their own. Static sites can be monitored for changes with good granularity. Premium subscription and other deep web sources, blogs, forums, news and regulatory filings are among the sources included. The end results will be delivered through the company’s RSS reader with email, IM and SMS alerts as appropriate.

While the initial offering is focused on financial markets - Kirkpatrick notes these huge aggregation systems probably only work right now for people dealing in "pure money" - Kirkpatrick is thrilled to imagine the broader possibilities.

The company’s primary strength is their domain knowledge around financial markets. If the same infrastructure could be built into other verticals, I don’t know how much demand there would be today, but I’m willing to bet there will be a whole lot in the future. In fact, now that research suites like Monitor110 are coming to market, those of us who have been piecing together several different services to gain a competitive advantage in our fields are going to have to move to the next level. Services like this will give many more people the tools to get high-quality information at very early stages after it emerges.

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Comments (4)

tim finin:

But what about spam and other attempts to game the system? Here's where their approach to reputation will be key. False stock tips is a common spam genre that is known to work. The success of systems like Monitor110 might lead to their own demise as spammers quickly adapt to it, creating and populating blogs that provide false signals and information. Detecting these bad sources, and doing it quickly, will be difficult.

Posted: September 21, 2006 7:19 AM

Marshall:

I am totally ga ga. I love stuff like this.

Posted: September 21, 2006 12:51 PM

Richard Koman:

;-)

Posted: September 21, 2006 10:10 PM

David Jackson:

Roger's a really smart guy, and I'm looking forward to seeing what this will look like. One key issue is how Monitor 110 will solve the issue of author credibility. Seeking Alpha, which aggregates stock market content from over 400 sources, solves that by a high-touch editorial approach, getting editors to communicate directly with authors and even getting authors to agree to compliance standards before posting articles on stocks. It will be fascinating to see whether Monitor 110 can solve that problem algorithmically.

Posted: March 13, 2007 3:05 PM