App designed for ‘daily IRO life’

IR website provider Q4 Web Systems has released an app designed for IROs and finance professionals, launching the Q4 Touch at last week’s NIRI conference in Chicago.

The free version of the app, which currently covers all North American equities, with plans for a broader reach later on, is available from the Apple App Store and Google Play and prompts users to provide their company stock ticker, bringing up a real-time news feed of IR-relevant content on both the IRO’s own company and its peers. Q4 Touch also offers a stock report page that compares the user’s company market performance with a list of peers on a customizable ‘watch list’, based on your industry and automatically created by Q4 when users first register.

‘Selecting a company on the watch list will take you to its company profile page where you will be able to see its current stock price, stock report and investor news,’ explains Q4 Web Systems in a blog on its website. ‘You’re also able to select a specific company to pin to the top of your list so you can easily compare its performance with others on your list. Like the user’s own company activity page, all of the news content has been curated to exclusively feature content that is meaningful to IROs.’

Flipping your phone to landscape offers additional datasets such as the option to compare the stock against ‘popular market indices like the S&P 500, NASDAQ 100 and the Dow Jones to get a true sense of how the company’s performance compares against the market,’ adds Q4.

Paid upgrade

While Q4 Touch is free, it has a paid-for add-on: the Trade Indicator. This offers users access to Q4 Trade Indicator scores – based on ‘the aggregate sentiment of 30,000 average daily trade ideas entered by sell-side traders’ into a platform operated by the TIM Group. This score is offered for both the user’s own company and their peers, while they can also see changes over 24 hours and one, three and 12 months.

Darrell Heaps, CEO of Q4 Web Systems, says the cost of the add-on varies depending on how many different users log on, while the total cost will also depend on how many of the company’s upcoming add-ons are used. ‘Soon we will be adding predictive datasets, built from Oxford Intelligence Partners options intelligence,’ he says. ‘Our surveillance clients will also benefit from complete surveillance reporting within Q4 Touch. Within a couple of months, we’ll offer ownership, targeting, estimates and other proprietary analytics.’

And although he acknowledges that elements of the app are available elsewhere, these are either part of a paid subscription or – Heaps mentions Yahoo! Finance and Bloomberg Business – not designed specifically for IR and finance professionals.

‘[IROs] constantly check stock prices and receive alerts to keep up with what’s going on,’ he says. ‘They’ll have their browser open to a finance page to periodically check stock, but there isn’t a good way to aggregate this information across their peer group and make it easily digestible. They might also use Google Alerts to keep up with news changes – but that ends up in an already overcrowded mailbox where important articles often get overlooked. We’ve provided a more focused app to deliver the content they need in an easily digestible format – without requiring additional effort from the IRO.’

Since last week’s launch, Heaps says the app has ‘had around 450 downloads, the majority of these coming after we announced at NIRI in Chicago. I’m happy to say this number is growing every day. We’re getting a good consistent number of daily downloads at the moment.’

Q4 has also created a video to walk people through the new Q4 Touch app: