MT Newswires Preps Asia Equities News Ramp-Up, Expands IM Commentary Access

MT Newswires CEO Brooks McFeely says the company expects to increase the size of its global newsroom by around 50 percent this year to fully cover the market.

“We have a number of reporters in Asia, but we want to cover Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Tokyo initially. We already provide oil coverage and broad economic news about the region, and we want to move into providing single-name equities news,” he says, adding that the vendor aims to launch coverage of Asian equity markets late in the third quarter or early fourth quarter of this year in response to demand from clients and partners in the region.

“We already have global coverage for our messaging services via Bloomberg and ICE IM [Intercontinental Exchange’s instant messaging platform],” McFeely says, referring to MT Newswires’ Ask Alyce and First Oil services, which allow end-user clients to question senior reporters about market trends. “Now our focus is on addressing the breadth and depth of our coverage.”

The vendor launched Ask Alyce in January 2017, and began making it available via ICE this February, and launched First Oil in the third quarter of last year, which immediately went live on ICE.

First Oil—similar to the Ask Alyce service, where clients can contact veteran journalist Alyce Andres-Frantz with questions about market movements and market rumors—uses instant messaging to connect oil trading professionals with MT Newswires’ newsroom, to gain insight into oil market trends from the vendor’s editorial staff.

“Initially, First Oil will likely be focused on the Canadian oil market, where there seems to be something of an information gap,” McFeely says. “We’re finding that the appetite is growing among our global clients for Canadian data. Wherever there is limited coverage of an asset class or market, that generally indicates an opportunity. So by covering those markets that might be illiquid or even dormant, clients can get access to markets they didn’t have before.”

However, the oil markets pose a unique challenge that equities markets do not, McFeely says. “A key difference from Ask Alyce is that the oil trading community tends to share information less, so we derive more on the information on First Oil from our own research rather than from end users. Oil markets are not as collaborative… so we’re trying to facilitate that collaboration in a way that clients can come to our editorial team but not necessarily share information with the entire community, he says.