YCharts Bows Streaming Updates, Alerts

Chicago-based fundamental data analysis provider YCharts will this week add streaming stock quotes and alerting functionality to its Web-based fundamental analysis platform, to more proactively deliver the information required by value-based investor and investment advisor clients, and provide a better user experience.

YCharts already provides live quotes, sourced from BATS Global Markets, but users needed to refresh their browser to see updated prices, whereas the vendor will now push streaming data—still sourced from BATS—through the platform to individual company pages, watchlists and portfolios containing live quotes.

Along with the streaming updates, YCharts is also launching an alerts feature that will generate notifications based on user-defined thresholds set to run against any data available on the platform—for example, to alert users when a company’s dividend yield hits a certain percentage, or when a company’s market capitalization reaches a specific amount. “Also, if you set up screening criteria, rather than having to re-run it each time to see if new companies match that criteria, the system will now tell you when a new company matches the screen you’ve set up. It’s much more proactive,” says YCharts chief executive Shawn Carpenter.

The alerting feature can also help subscribers to YCharts Pro—the version of the product for professional and active retail investors—to monitor the portfolio strategies developed by YCharts’ internal analysts, by notifying clients when stocks are added to or removed from a strategy, and to changes in YCharts’ proprietary ratings, which assign each stock an “attractive,” “neutral” or “avoid” rating. “Customers following our ratings system currently check every day to see if their stocks’ ratings have changed, so providing these alerts just seemed like a much better user experience,” Carpenter says.

YCharts will also apply the alerting feature to new datasets as it expands the content available via the platform, with the addition of more economic indicators—which the vendor plans to expand to around 100,000 by year-end, from around 14,000 at present—and data from 13F holdings filings.

The vendor already provides the holdings of investment vehicles run by high-profile investors such as George Soros and Warren Buffett, based on their 13F filings, and is now expanding its coverage to all 13F filers, which includes any institutional investment firm managing more than $100 million. “Clients like to use this data for idea generation, to see who’s holding a certain stock, or to follow what certain managers are buying and selling… and they’ll be able to set alerts on this data,” Carpenter says.

A round of funding led by Morningstar late last year (IMD, Nov. 21, 2011) has enabled YCharts to accelerate its content expansion and development roadmap, which includes growing its engineering team and opening a new office in New York last week. The office houses 10 engineering staff, headed by co-founder and chief technology officer Ara Anjargolian, and the vendor is now seeking to recruit a further four developers, Carpenter says.