Trefis crafts search for info-starved investors

The world really does need another search engine. At least both do-it-yourself and professional investors do, according toTrefis, which is launching a new search option that it says will return only pertinent, rich data about the companies these investors follow.

The new Trefis search separates the wheat from the chaff, said founder and CEOManish Jhunjhunwala in an interview Friday.

If you were to run a search on coffee on Google or Yahoo Finance or another search engine, you would get a ton of responses including a list of coffee companies, but none of them very useful, he noted.

But with Trefis search, you will instead get rich data around Starbucks, McDonalds, and Dunkin Donuts, information about their revenue, their profit margin, units sold and revenue per customer, he said.

That builds on Trefis original thesis that for an investor to know about a companys financials, he must know about that companys products and how well (or not) they are selling.

For example, if youre an investor following Disney, you might wonder what Disneys largest business is. Is it Mickey Mouse and characters? Is it parks and resorts? Is it movies? Well, if you go to Trefis, youd see that ESPN is actually Disneys largest business. ABC, Lifetime, parks and resorts are all small [by comparison]. Parks and resorts make up less than 10 percent of Disneys business,Jhunjhunwala said.

If investors know that type of info they can make more intelligent assumptions about how different macro events will affect Disneys prospects.

Similarly, if you follow Apple you probably would like to know how much of Apples stock price is related to iPad as opposed to iPhone as opposed to Macs. Trefis experts many ! of them are former Wall Street sell-side analysts have already been compiling that sort of data since the company was founded two years ago and their knowledge informs the search results (as it turns out, Trefis estimates that iPhone accounts for 52 percent of Apples stock value compared to 12.2 percent for iPad, and 12 percent for Macintosh.)

Trefis services both its existing online research and the new search are free to casual, intermittent users but people who run a lot of analyses and searches will hit a pay wall. At that point, the Trefis Pro service is available for $15 per user per month.

Trefis has partnerships with ETrade and Microsoft Bing search.

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