MARKET INTELLIGENCE
Spend any time online chatting about stocks and you'll see a lot of "DD." As in, "Do your own damn DD!" DD, of course, is shorthand for "due diligence," the less entertaining, more time-consuming side of investing wisely. You know the drill - sift through balance sheets, look up P/E ratios, read S-1 filings on Edgar Online (www.edgar-online.com).
But these financial statements paint only part of the picture. They don't reveal - or they leave incomplete - where a company stands relative to its competitors. For this, turn to Sectorbase.com. The San Francisco startup has created a qualitative database that lets you see an enterprise's competitors, customers, suppliers, and strategic partners on a product-by-product, service-by-service basis. There's much more you can do with the data too, but the core of the service is what's known in the trade as exact comparables.
It doesn't come cheap. A subscription to Sectorbase.com - with unlimited report-making and complete site access - costs $895 a month. But there are less expensive options. It's free to register, and that gets you news analysis and the Sectorbase indices at the top three levels of the database hierarchy, where you can see which sectors are most active. However, you can't find out which companies comprise a particular category unless you pony up $9.95 for a preformatted report on a company or sector, or you spring for full access.
Like so many Web-based startups, Sectorbase.com began as a service the founders weren't getting. About two years ago, CEO David Baker managed hedge funds, and CFO Steve Shum was his lead analyst. Both were fed up with doing the legwork each time they wanted exact comparables. Their homegrown database quickly outgrew the scope of a hedge fund, and they patented the process they'd developed; Sectorbase.com went live in May 1999. Since then, the site has registered 4,000-plus users and more than 500 full-access clients.
Future Sectorbase perks will include email/pager alerts, sector-specific ezines, and syndicated news stories. Soon the service will index every company traded on US exchanges (now it covers only the tech and health care categories) as well as most private US firms - a feature that should prove helpful in anticipating IPOs. Speaking of which, Sectorbase.com plans its own within a year or two. The question is, how do you find its exact comparable?
Sectorbase.com: (877) 732 8672, www.sectorbase.com.
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