2013 Review: Crowd-Sourced Content, Search Gain Traction

One such service is New York-based startup Estimize, which creates consensus estimates on stocks by polling thousands of individuals and buy-side firms. In April, social media data aggregator Gnip added the vendor’s content to the data available via its API as Estimize was in the midst of expanding its coverage (IMD, April 29). Later in the year, Estimize added estimates on private companies in addition to listed companies (IMD, June 10), launched an earnings calendar of upcoming financial statements with companies ranked by popularity (IMD, Aug. 15), followed by a “Select Consensus” weighted estimates service that allows users to filter and sort estimate results according to contributor types, based on metrics that indicate a contributor’s accuracy (IMD, Sept. 18).

Another example of innovation in content collection is Empirasign, which earlier this year expanded the dealer offering and trade color data it captures by parsing data from emails to potential counterparties containing dealers’ lists and offerings to include agency fixed rate specified offerings (IMD, Oct. 7), and is now adding new datasets covering bids and two-way markets to its database, in response to client demand for more transparent data to support trading and valuation activities (IMD, Dec. 16).

Search functions also came into focus as firms look for ways to interrogate data, with Austin, Texas-based 9W Search launching the production release of its financial search engine and developing a screener tool to help users filter data (IMD, April 24).

Meanwhile, startup Canadian financial search engine Quandl managed to incorporate search and crowd-sourcing initiatives in its first year of operation. The vendor began beta testing at the start of 2013 with free data from exchanges, industry bodies and publicly available data sources, designed to make it easier for analysts, traders and economists to find numerical data online (IMD, Jan. 12), then doubled the number of datasets it covered within a few months to more than 4 million datasets and launched stock pages for 5,000 stocks (IMD, April 12), and will next year introduce an “as-a-service” model that allows third parties to upload and curate content (IMD, Dec. 16).