Reuters Delivering YouDevise Trade Ideas

By Maria Trombly | Securities Industry News | April 10, 2006

Reuters Group announced last week that it is the first vendor to distribute the Trade Idea Monitor (TIM) system that youDevise of London developed for brokerages to transmit trading suggestions to buy-side and money manager clients.

Users are now able to view the trade ideas on their Reuters 3000 Xtra screens, along with related price quotes, news and analytics, and converse with colleagues using instant messaging. Buy-side customers have the flexibility of selecting brokers with which to trade and from which to receive ideas.

"This really takes the system up to a new dimension," said Peter Bennett, a London-based product marketing manager with Credit Suisse, which, like other TIM users, had been dependent on Web browsers for access. "This makes it easier to use and makes it easier to get to the institutional customers because they will already have the Reuters screen up. There's no clicking through to Web sites."

Credit Suisse has about 140 research analysts forwarding trading suggestions over the system to about 100 people on the sales and trading side, said Bennett. The facility "is becoming increasingly important for us" internally, he said, and now Credit Suisse is about to start using the system to reach institutional clients.

The link with youDevise, which introduced TIM in the U.K. last October and in the U.S. on Feb. 1 (Securities Industry News, Feb. 13), is the latest example of Reuters' openness to outside services that add utility to its terminal offerings. It is currently developing a feed handler that will bring competitor Bloomberg's B-Pipe onto the Reuters Market Data System. In February, Reuters announced an exclusive deal to add MasterCard's SpendingPulse retail spending statistics to its data menu.

"We're moving from a world where content was king to a different approach, typified by the SpendingPulse and TIM arrangements", said Stephen Wilson, Reuters' global head of exchange-traded instruments. He said that Reuters is committed to "providing high-value research, analysis and trading capabilities through a single screen. [The TIM offering] illustrates the importance of Reuters Messaging on desktop products, encouraging dialogue between our customers looking to make informed and timely investment decisions and brokers channeling equity trading ideas through Reuters 3000 Xtra."

About 1,200 people are currently using TIM, most of them in Europe. With the distribution agreement, the service is available to 100,000 Reuters customers with their 3000 Xtra subscription at no additional charge. "We see it very much as a community-building activity," said Kevin Lowther, the Reuters business development manager for institutional equities who worked on the youDevise partnership. "It allows the buy side to control the flow of information from their brokers. They're pretty much overwhelmed on a daily basis with hundreds of phone calls and hundreds of e-mails. [TIM] allows them to catch that information in a single channel."

YouDevise's contract with Reuters is not exclusive, but there are no current plans for other distribution partnerships, said youDevise director Colin Berthoud.

It took about three months to integrate TIM into the Reuters systems, followed by another three to four months of testing and refinement. At launch, the system had ten beta users, both sell- and buy-side firms.