Summary posted by Robyn Stockand, National Bank Financial, on December 3, 2003.

For investment research reports, what I was looking for was an alternative to the Investext or Multex databases, rather than just a different means of accessing the same databases. We have access to both of these services directly from Thomson and Multex.  I was advised by our Alacra representative that they do some additional indexing to the Investext records and so that might be helpful for conducting more refined searches.

As well, I learned that access to Investext from Northern Light has a refund feature for pages that don't meet your needs.  It was also suggested that I simply contact a library at one of the investment banks, but that isn't an option for us, as we aren't convinced that a library would necessarily have authority to distribute research created by the company's analysts, especially to a competing investment bank.  Nor are we comfortable with setting up trial accounts at these firms to access their research. Finally, Capital IQ and The Markets were suggested. The former is not an option for us as it appears to be a platform for existing content rather than provider of new content; the latter is simply too limited in it's scope. All of these firms already contribute to Multex and/or Investext.

Summary posted by Carolyn Ruby Weilage, Micron Technology, on January 31, 2002

Back in December I asked for suggestions on sources for locating Market Research information to use as a supplement or instead of options on Dialog and Datastar. At long last I have had time to summarize the responses I received.

They should also consider Intelligence Data (another Thomson company!) - InSite2, Intelliscope (analyst reports), MarkIntel (market reports) and Global Access (Disclosure) are all "gold standard" products.

We use Investext Plus and Market Research Monitor (Euromonitor). We did have Forrester Research and MarketResearch.com, both of which were good but we had to cut.

We use Investext directly - of course it is available on Dialog as well. Also Bloomberg News Service. The "Marketful" onesearch group is one that I use on Dialog to find additional reports (not really an end-user kind of thing, but you could set it up as one using the Intranet Tool Kit - or contract with Dialog to do it).

Trade associations can be helpful.

Often through a news (Nexis, Dow Jones Interactive) or web search I will locate an expensive source of proprietary information in a subject area - such as IDC for IT. A lot of these are available exclusively from originating company.

...at one point when we were having difficulties with our Intelliscope contract I took a close look at Profound. Profound offers many of the big analyst house reports, like IDC, which we already subscribed to, so it wasn't worth it to us. I recommend that you determine which analyst houses you are most likely to use with the greatest frequency (the Gartners and IDCs and Forresters of the world, as well as the Wall Street firms available on a page by page basis through Investext). Then make sure whichever database you subscribe to has the ones you want on a timely basis. If you're primarily interested in the Wall Street reports you have access to them via Nexis or Dialog (although the CI team may not). Profound looked user-friendly to me, but make sure the sources you need are there and that you're not duplicating what you already have.

Profound is very good. MarketResearch.com and ecnext.com are also good resources

Sources FOR Market Research:

• MarkIntel is the market research database on Thomson/Dialog. It is part of the "Research Bank Web/Investext" service.
• Research Bank Web offers online delivery of the latest full-text and original-image research reports from the top investment banks, brokerage houses, market research firms, and trade associations. Nearly 80% of the sources are unique to Thomson Financial Securities Data.

Sources ABOUT Market Research:

Gale publishes a directory of market research companies and reports.

EPM Communications publishes "Research Alert" to keep you apprised of new U.S. market research releases in various industries. Published 24 times a year.

Outsell, Inc. is a research advisory service, providing information on the information industry.

You may want to check out Intelliscope/Intelligence Data they are part of Thomson which also owns Dialog. We have a weekly automated search that provides us with analyst reports. I also will log-on and search their database as well and usually find what I need.

We use Intelliscope too (where I work part-time). However, there is a lag in the equity analysts reports. It may be that your CFO receives much more current reports already. It might be worthwhile to check out. That said, Intelliscope is great to use!

Alacra (formerly known as Data Downlink/XLS) is designed for use by information-intensive industries, such as banking, consulting, corporations and law. The cornerstone of Alacra is its database of more than 30,000 business-oriented Web sites, hand-selected and hand-indexed by credentialed business information professionals. In addition to the 30,000 web sites, Alacra will also give you access to over 85 premium databases, as well as news feeds.

Here is a sampling of some of the other data that you might find interesting:

• Barra Betas - the only place online to receive predictive and historic beta's on companies, industries, and sectors.
• Mergerstat - for all of your M&A transaction information.
• Investext - analyst reports from over 300 of the leading investment banks, brokerages, and consulting firms worldwide. Alacra also will provide the full table of contents for each report which will give you the ability to download as few as one page of the report.
• Private Company Info - click on tools up at the top and then private company finder. This will screen on seven different private company databases that we have on our system.
• Public Company Finder - tools, then public company finder. This allows you to screen on over 40,000 global companies, sort the data a number of different ways, as well as the ability of downloading everything into Excel.
• Earnings Estimates - access to I/B/E/S/, Multex and Nelsons estimates. ID Exec - contact info on almost 400,000 business decision makers from over 60,000 of the world's largest public, private, government, and non-profit organizations.

One feature of Alacra that was found most attractive by other clients is our built-in client bill-back function. Another is the ability to search across the "hidden-web."