S&P's Capital IQ Acquires TheMarkets.com Research and Estimate Models

The combined companies will deliver a complete investment management research offering to the buy side.

In a move to provide investment research and financial analytics to the buy side, Capital IQ, announced the acquisition of TheMarkets.com, an aggregator of sell-side research and earnings estimate models.

“This acquisition is going to allow us to have the most complete investment management research offering,” said Randall Winn, executive managing director of Capital IQ, a business unit of Standard & Poor’s.

The deal will enable S&P’s Capital IQ, which is owned by McGraw Hill, to go up against the big three players in financial data and analytics, Factset, Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg. Analysts estimate that the global financial data and analytics industry is $15 billion or as much as $23 billion, according to estimates cited by the release.

With the acquisition of The Markets.com, Capital IQ gains “unique access to content from the leading investment banking firms,” such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.

Capital IQ is already in the fundamental research and proprietary research used in stock selection. “Our mission is to provide data and analytics to investment managers, private equity and corporations. Investment managers “use us to find stocks to invest in.” By integrating the content from both companies, “The buy side is going to use that content to generate ideas in new ways,” said Winn. “And they’re going to save time and do more effective research.”

In terns of value-added content, TheMarkets.com offers access on an aggregated basis to earning models from Wall Street firms. “That is the math that shows how an analyst builds up to an earnings estimate and where their projections come from,” explained Winn. “It’s an Excel model where somebody can really dig into the details of what an analyst is projecting,” he said.

In addition, TheMarkets.com brings equity, fixed income and other asset classes into one place, which fits into the buy-side trend of looking across multiple asset classes, said Winn. While TheMarkets.com brings in research reports and fixed income research, Win said, Capital IQ provides a much broader set of tools and data for people to do their research. 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