9W Adds Analysis Templates, Expands Pricing Data

Austin, Texas-based financial search engine startup 9W Search has added financial scenario templates to its web-based financial information search engine, to enable users to more quickly compile the data points needed for their analysis, and plans to add more pricing data and deeper historical financial ratios to its stock quote pages as the vendor prepares to move its platform out of beta and into full live production.

9W's platform now includes a Scenarios feature that provides templates that pull together financial data and ratios to support four types of analysis: Financial Outlook, Competitive Intelligence, Merger & Acquisition and SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. For example, the M&A template includes financial items such as capital expenditures and profit that acquirers or investors look at to analyze a company's performance, while the Financial Outlook template includes key indicators such as earnings per share and revenue that help investors estimate a company's future performance.

"By providing these templates, we take the pain out of the user having to assemble those items themselves," says 9W chief executive Susan Strausberg, though she adds that users can adjust the templates and include additional data elements as needed. The vendor also plans to build out more templates, including industry-specific scenarios like financial outlook for technology companies, or for oil and gas companies, as well as encouraging users to contribute their own scenarios, she says.

9W is also expanding its Stock Quotes page with more extensive pricing data. Currently, the page only provides the current price, so the vendor plans to add data points such as 52-week high and low, and the percent change over a week, a quarter and a year, to provide users with more insight into a company's stock price, Strausberg says.

Meanwhile, whereas the vendor provides five years' worth of historical financial data, its financial ratios only go back one year, so 9W is now adding more historical ratios to expand that dataset to five years' of data as well, and expects this deeper historical data to be available in the coming weeks, Strausberg says.

As it increases the amount of data available in its platform, 9W is also completing a screener tool that will enable users to more quickly filter through the data to generate with lists of companies that meet user-defined criteria, such as specific industries and sectors, or financial items, such as revenue range, Strausberg says.