Alacra Launches PulsePro For News Filtering

Alacra, Inc. announced the launch of PulsePro, an advanced application for filtering and gathering intelligence from the deluge of Web-based news alerts, headlines and press releases.

Alacra Pro extracts only pertinent business events, including analyst comments, CEO remarks, M&A rumors and debt restructurings, according to the company’s release. The service will gather news and analyst commentary on publicly traded companies from across the Web, filtering both traditional media and alternative/social media (i.e., blogs, Twitter) among others.

Designed to meet the needs of wealth and asset managers, investment bankers and professional service executives, Alacra PulsePro aims to improve upon existing intelligence gathering solutions with a four-step proprietary process: source selection, event detection, semantic analysis, and human editorial oversight.

“The volume of useless information a business professional needs to plow through each day is staggering,” commented Steven Goldstein, CEO of Alacra, Inc. in the release. “By carefully vetting our sources and accurately extracting key business events, PulsePro dramatically improves the signal-to-noise ratio,” said Goldstein in the release.

PulsePro has been developed in consultation with the company’s user based of more than 400 global institutions, corporations and professional services firms.

The product was originally released as Street Pulse, a free Web application spotlighting company-specific comments by sell-side, ratings agency and industry analysts, plus influential bloggers. Alacra is launching PulsePro, a subscription-based service, with a month-long open-access period, allowing professionals full premium access, fee of charge through April 15, 2010.

Additional event-specific filters include: Chief Pulse, remarks by C-level corporate officers (CEOs, CFOs, etc.); Deal Pulse, news and commentary on rumored, announced and completed M&A transactions and Weak Pulse: corporate distress signals such as debt restructurings, reorganizations, layoffs, bankruptcies and ‘ seeking strategic alternatives.’ Users can personal the product by setting up profiles and watch lists tracking critical events impacting specific companies, industries or geographies. They can also set up email alerts choosing what news is pushed to them on events like new M&A rumors and ideas, analyst price target changes, etc.

There will be feeds and XML-based APIs to support easy integration within portals CRM systems or other applications, including algorithmic trading models.

In its next phase, the natural evolution of PulsePro is to tie the news feeds to algorithmic trading strategies so firms can develop automated, news-based algorithms, according to the company. Along these lines, Alacra is in discussions and backtesting now with a number of firms to make this happen within the next six months.

Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio