Monitor 110 Is Rolling Out an Internet Search Service for Hedge Funds and Institutions

How can hedge funds and portfolio managers dig through the Internet to discover investment ideas before they appear in the mainstream news? And how do they determine the content relevancy and reputation of online sources?

Enter Monitor 110, an industrial-strength search engine that sifts, sorts and prioritizes online information for institutional investors. The New York-based start-up offers a real-time Internet monitoring service focused on serving the needs of hedge funds, portfolio managers and analysts. "There is great demand for information that has not been picked over," says Jeff Stewart, the company's founder and chairman. "They're all looking at the same price feeds [and] news reports. These are tired strategies."

Recognizing that black-box traders and investment managers receive the same news feeds at the same instant, Monitor 110 capitalizes on the semi-unstructured data that underlies the Internet. According to Stewart, the service searches tens of millions of Web pages - including "Joe bloggers," employees' personal blogs, special-interest blogs, corporate Web sites, industry news, regulatory and government sources, local and regional news, drug-trial message boards, union sites, and consumer advocacy sites - and ranks the information by applying artificial intelligence, machine learning and algorithms to the tickers and tags of the content. "Every day, the company finds thousands of new sites that are of interest to investors," he says.

About 12 hedge funds currently use the service, providing feedback to Monitor 110 while "making money," says Stewart, who claims there is a backlog of firms waiting to test it out. To solve the infrastructure headaches for Wall Street CIOs, Monitor 110 is offering the service as an application-service-provider (ASP) model. The company plans to expand availability in early 2007.

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

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