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INVESTOR ACADEMY

News Sites

There are two main sites that most UK investors use to obtain regulatory news content (RNSs). Several other sites, including most broker sites, also offer news content. Both sites allow you to set up “alerts” that send you an email to alert you to news from a company you are interested in.

Investegate

Investegate is the most widely used corporate news site. Typing a quoted company’s TIDM into the search box and pressing <enter>, lists all recent RNSs for the company (if you do not know the correct TIDM, select “Company” above the search box and you can search by company name instead). Clicking the investegatearrow symbol navigates to older RNSs, investegate makes it easy to scroll through the entire archive of RNSs for a company, which is particularly useful when researching a potential new investment.

In addition to RNSs, Investegate also provides a diary of forthcoming corporate events: navigate to this self-explanatory area at the bottom right hand side of the list of RNSs:

Clicking on the appropriate link in this box provides a list of upcoming results announcements, general meeting dates, ex-dividend dates and anticipated trading updates. This is particularly useful for constructing a diary of corporate events relevant to your investments or prospective investments.

The chief disadvantage of Investegate is that the site deliberately filters out NAV announcements by investment trusts (this is to avoid clutter, as some trusts issue them daily). Sometimes, however, you may wish to see these, which can be viewed here.

lse

London Stock Exchange

Typing a TIDM or company name into the search box on the page linked above produces a list of all matching companies. Clicking on this symbol: lsenewssymbol to the right of the name of the company you’re interested in shows a list of recent RNSs relating to that company. Note that by default NAV and certain other announcements are suppressed. To view these you need to click the “Show filters” option next to the search box. This then offers the option to select which types of RNS to display. “Show all” will reveal all news items, including NAV announcements. Make sure you also select the appropriate time period, before hitting “Search” again to apply your new filter options.

The chief disadvantage of the LSE site is that, unlike Investegate, a maximum of 3 months worth of RNSs can be viewed at a time. This can make it rather tedious to trawl through a lengthy history of RNS announcements when researching a company.

The LSE site allows you to set up news “alerts” for companies, which send you an email whenever news is released relating to that company. The following video tutorial shows you how to do this (you may find it easier to see if you choose the “full screen” option):

Other investor news sites

In addition to the regulatory news, many companies allow investors to subscribe to their own news services, via the investor relations section of their website, through which they may release further news about their progress, contract wins etc, which may not be sufficiently material to merit an RNS announcement. Further, setting up Google alerts can be useful for monitoring news emanating from subsidiaries of a group you are interested in.

CityFalcon is an exciting new “news aggregator” site. It offers the capability to combine news from a broad range of sources into in a single feed for the user. AI techniques are used to filter and prioritise news times to suit your own personal requirements. This can help to solve the “information overload” problem that active investors can suffer from. It also offers a range of alerting options. The site is still under development, so its range of news sources and assets that can be monitored is limited, at present. I have found the site’s owners to be responsive to customer issues and it’s worth registering, trying the site out and providing feedback so that, ultimately, it becomes a valuable resource.

MAB 19 June 2017