CONVERGENCE

Wireless twist to your portfolio

AlphaTrade offers personalised market information in Hindi on your smart phone. Pragati Verma reports

You could call it wireless buzz to investing. Now you can track your stocks’ ups and downs even on the golf course or beach or car. Retail investors can access personalised trading info and real-time quotes unavailable on free web portals through AlphaTrade.

Claiming to be the inexpensive avatar of Reuters and Bloomberg, it offers market information on desktop computers and wireless devices like mobile phones.

With pricing starting at $17 a month, it is obviously much cheaper than Reuters or Bloomberg terminals that can set you back by few thousand dollars. CEO, Penny Perfect is expecting to attract 100,000 or more active users of AlphaTrade products in the first year in India.

"Millions who follow the market in India would find AlphaTrade products like E-Gate and Jupiter highly inexpensive compared to other known financial data providers. Without any advertising or marketing, we already have a few hundred subscribers," she argues. To begin with, we are adding the stock market feeds for BSE and NSE immediately.

Hindi offering will also be added to the product mix to cater to a larger network.

"People would rather deal with financial information in their native languages. We are willing to add new languages as we encounter the need. All of our products have been designed in a modular fashion so they can be modified and enhanced as needed in new markets," she asserts.

Aggressive marketing push is also being planned. AlphaTrade plans to give a longer trial period for its stock quote information product of 60 days compared to the standard 14-days.AlphaTrade boasts of a subscribers from more than 40 different countries and provides real time stock quotes along with other financial data for both desktops and wireless devices.

Wireless is the most happening growth segment outside North America. "The demand for mobile financial solutions has increased dramatically over the last year as the number of mobile professionals worldwide," says Penny. It currently offers real time stock quotes, streaming portfolios totaling 600 symbols, investments, and high resolution stock charts real-time news, real-time gain/loss positions in customisable fields, in English, Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese.

Claiming to be the world’s only multi-lingual, wireless application for investors and traders seeking real-time knowledge on the move, its wireless service is compatible with a number of PDA’s and smart phones that support JAVA/J2ME, including RIM BlackBerry, Nokia, Palm OS, Window CE devices and Symbian OS.

It sure offers a relatively inexpensive option to all the road warriors who need to stay informed on the go.