smallcapcenter.comBest of the Net
smallcapcenter.comDateline: 10/21/99
On Oct. 5th, Vancouver based Stockgroup.com completely revamped their website and relaunched it as smallcapcenter.com and the change has been a good one. You may have seen one of their full page ads in your newspaper. They've been blizing the continent with ads in the National Post, Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Sun Times, Investor's Business Daily and others.
They got additional media attention when Ted Turner's CNN turned down their advertising. Seems Ted considers them and Salon among others to be dangerous competition and refuses to carry their ads.
There are thousands of small cap stocks on the market, but only limited coverage on the Internet. Information on Canadian small cap companies in particular is hard to come by. Smallcapcenter.com aims to rectify that. As they put it, they will cover the "missing 8000" stocks with their extensive database.
Those familiar with the old Stockgroup site will find a lot of changes. The layout is crisper and cleaner. And there is a heck of a lot more material and useful tools. The things investors look for in an investing site are its tools. How does this site help me get the information I want? Smallcapcenter.com offers some unique ones not widely available elsewhere.
The site's main page features the news story of the day and scrolling down brings you more original coverage from their staff of writers. They also carry some wire items, but the focus is on original content about small cap stocks. They aim to publish 15-35 original articles a day. Some of the news is headlined in a Members Only section, but membership is free.
Their news coverage includes midday and end of day stock market reports as well as IPO advancers and follow ups.
On the right side of the main page are selected commentaries from freelance contributors (also for Members Only), and on the left is their Main Menu, a stock search box, a list of the top ten trading small cap stocks by volume (updated every 30 minutes) and the small cap indices - the Russell 2000, S&P Small Cap and VSE Composite, as well as the major indices.
The bottom of your screen shows a framed Channel Menu leading you to news organized by categories - Markets, Company Watch, Commentary and Personal Finance.
Tools is where smallcapcenter.com excels. It features a number of handy tools for investors including the following:
Most Active Stocks - You can get a list of the fifty most active stocks by volume or dollar volume and can further refine your search by industry and stock exchange. You can also check for the top fifty hitting new highs or new lows.
Financial Search - Here you can search out companies by market cap, P/E, EPS, dividends, revenue or revenue change. Again you can narrow it down by industry sector.
Inside Traders Search - This is a tool I haven't seen anywhere else. You can get the info on Insider Trading for any company with this handy search engine. You can refine the search by company position, specific names, or volume of trading. Another handy use for this tool is to find out where an executive has moved to. For example, if I want to find out where John Lacey, former head of WIC International Broadcasting, is now, I just enter John Lacey in the Name of Filer box, click Search and find he is now with Loewen Group. (Of course, that won't work if the executive searched for hasn't done any insider trading.)
Technical Search - Smallcapcenter's Technical Search page lets you search out companies by their moving averages, support levels, volatility, gaps, stochastics and a myriad of other factors. A very comprehensive analytical tool indeed.
Recommendations Search - If you want to know how analysts are rating a particular stock, enter the stock symbol and you'll find out how many are rating it and what they rate it at (on a five point scale). Click on the company link and then on Full Analyst Concensus Report and you get a wealth of information on the company and how it's doing. Or you can search out all stocks receiving better than a certain rating, or followed by your specified minimum number of brokers.
Holdings Search - Another great tool is the Holdings Search. You can find out what institutions or even specific people are holding shares in a particular company, or vice versa, what companies a particular institution is holding shares in. For example, searching for Nortel by entering the stock symbol NT, we find that ten institutions hold shares of Nortel, including the Ivy Canadian mutual fund, the Caisse de Depot de Quebec and four different Vanguard funds.
Company Search - lets you search out info on a company symbol or search string, geographical location, exchange, industry, number of shares outstanding, stock price, and market cap or any combination of the these. For example, here's a list of B.C. based Internet companies. This tool needs refinement as I can name quite a few more companies than the four it came up with. (Stockscape, Global Investment.com, Electric Mail, Stox.com, MedEra Life Sciences, and Net Nanny among others). These stocks do come up in their database when specifically searched for, but failed to turn up in my search.
Other tools include an article search and, of course, a portfolio tracker. Although not listed under Research Tools, the stock search box leads you to a profile page for each stock which includes contact information, a short write-up on the business, and current stock price and stock chart. For Canadian stocks you have to add those annoying prefixes.
Other features include forums and market snapshots for various sectors.
Smallcapcenter.com is clearly a winner. It still has some refinement to do. Navigating the site garners a fair number of "Connection Refused" errors (though they often resolve if you try again) and their server is sometimes slow, particularly on searches. And their database is still being added to.
But they are on the move and aggressively and vigorously expanding their small cap news coverage and in-house functionality. They have some money behind them, including an investment by media mogul Conrad Black's Southam Inc..
On the basis of their excellent research tools alone, they're my pick for Best of the Net for October.
Email me: Do you have a favorite site you would like to recommend as a site of the month? Why not email me with the details!
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September 1999 Best of the Net
- the i|money site.
July 1999 Best of the Net
- the Fund Library
site.
June 1999 Best of the Net
- the globeinvestor.com
site.
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