Yahoo Starts Brokerage Research Sales
Yahoo Inc. has launched a subscription service to sell Wall Street brokerage research reports online through its Yahoo Finance portal. The service features research from more than 150 brokerage houses, including U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray Inc., Chase Hambrecht & Quist Inc. and SG Cowen Securities Corp.The service, available at http://finance.yahoo.com/reports, enables consumers to buy monthly subscription packages to research reports or buy reports on an individual basis. Yahoo is offering three subscription levels: five reports for $14.95 per month; 10 reports for $24.95 per month; and 25 reports for $49.95 per month. Individual reports are available at market rates.
"This service is the first of its kind to offer bundled research reports online," said Katie Jacobs Stanton, senior producer for Yahoo Finance. "We are really impressed with the sign-ups we have so far."
She would not say how many people have signed up for the service, nor whether the bundled subscriptions or pay-per-report options were more popular.
The reports available through the service are the same ones the brokerage houses send to their clients, Stanton said, though they are embargoed from one to 14 days. The average embargo, she said, is about seven days.
Brokerage houses generally make their research available to their institutional customers -- who can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for the privilege -- immediately after the analysts write them. Those reports then are made available to consumers, through services such as Yahoo's, a few days or even a few weeks after their institutional customers see them.
Stanton said Yahoo gets the reports from Thomson Financial, whose First Call service aggregates brokerage research reports and makes them available to brokers, analysts and money managers.
