According to the Bloomberg article:

For the unacquainted, Bloomberg terminals are the de facto research platform for traders and asset managers. Financial institutions pay almost $2k per terminal per month for access to Bloomberg. Once inside, a trader or researcher has access to most of the information and data on the planet. Bloomberg provides a lot of information as part of its basic service. Many trading platforms plug directly into Bloomberg so that traders can go from research, to financial modeling, to trading and reconciliation — all on the same machine and interface.

An article in the WSJ profiled the Aspen Institute’s most recent report which you can read in its entirety here (.pdf). The WSJ’s Justin Lahart reports in “An End to the Focus on Short Term Urged” that the elite Aspen Institute’s report is pretty clear in its characterization of the short-termism that pervades both Wall Street and corporate America.

An article in the WSJ profiled the Aspen Institute’s most recent report which you can read in its entirety here (.pdf). The WSJ’s Justin Lahart reports in “An End to the Focus on Short Term Urged” that the elite Aspen Institute’s report is pretty clear in its characterization of the short-termism that pervades both Wall Street and corporate America.

In an article published yesterday, Ian Salisbury of Dow Jones explains that the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) believes that investors are combining buying inverse ETFs on margin, which compounds the effects of leverage. Brokers and their clients have used inverse and leveraged ETFs as an alternative to margin accounts needed to buy stocks on leverage or options to achieve similar strategies. It seems FINRA believes that investors are actually buying leveraged ETFs on margin — a no-no from a regulatory standpoint.

To that end, I recently got a chance to shmooze with Divya Narenda, founder of SumZero, an interesting expert investment community servicing professional investors. Divya’s got an impressive pedigree which reads Sowood, CSFB and Harvard. He was also a co-founder of ConnectU.com. Google that one.

That’s exactly what SkyGrid is attempting. Until recently, SkyGrid charged $6000 per seat/year for a flash interface that allows users to track financial news on stocks and sectors they’re interested in. In April, the company, which raised $11M in April from top venture firms, transitioned away from a premium model to a completely free model.

I learned about the intricacies of building platform leadership from a book by the same name, “Platform Leadership” which I read during my MBA. The book by Gawer and Cusumano detailed how Cisco (CSCO), Intel (INTC) and Microsoft (MSFT) drove industry innovation by building a robust, standardized technology platform that other leading-edge products could plug into.

1. Boutique investment advisory houses: Built by brokers/advisors who themselves have defected from the large wirehouses, these firms take service and advice very seriously. In some sense, they’re a further move into full-service. They are competing head-on with traditional brokerages by upping the ante on technology, service and investment advice. Investors who feel slighted by their advisor and want the extra hand-holding find this model really attractive. It’s interesting to note that many of these firms are being founded/built by traditional brokers evolving to this model.
2. Online brokerages: Firms like E*Trade (ETFC) and Ameritrade (AMTD) are taking the bulk of this business. In the wake of the financial tsunami, some investors are looking to take back investment decisions and don’t want to pay someone else for underperformance. Proof of this is in capital flowing to online brokerages. E*Trade reported that it had net new accounts of almost 30,000 in the first quarter of 2009 with $3.5 billion in net new customer assets.

I’ve written about the emergent trend towards high end investment advisors and how traditional stock brokers are resurrecting themselves and building smaller, nimbler firms with their billion-dollar books of business. I’ve spent less time discussing how online brokers are luring assets.

What’s your philosophy?
AH: We focus primarily on the small to mid-cap world.  We apply a value approach.  Basically, we’re looking for two things.  We’re looking for value where there is a clear catalyst to unlock this value or cheap growth with value undiscovered, on the cusp of coming out.  Unfortunately, I’m not a big commodity buff and have not been riding this current wave.

Can you give us a couple of examples of some successes you’ve had?
AH: I’ll give you an example from last bear market of 2002.  We invested in a firm, CNXS, that manufactured a product called Breathe Right nasal strips.  The firm had $1.50 per share in cash, was going to earn $0.40 and was trading at $4.50.  The following year, the stock was up three or four times as the company expanded margins and grew its business.  We saw insider buying and management change, two other things we look for.  Eventually, Glaxo (GSK) bought the company for $37.

Let me explain: Israel suffered from bouts of hyperinflation during its 60 years of existence.  Most salient was the 1970s, which saw double digit inflation throughout the decade, culminating in over 100% inflation in 1979.  The beginning of the 1980s introduced stagflation and saw even higher inflation rates.

This interview was featured in Israel Opportunity Investor, our subscription newsletter:

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Deutsche Bank (DB) believes in the Zoran story, as it believes the firm will continue to see strong growth in digital TV and mobile phones in the second half of 2008. The bank believes ZRAN will conies to see demand driven from emerging markets with some support provided by converter box revenues. In a note to investors published yesterday, DB analysts said the leader in the consumer semiconductor market believes “that it is gaining share in printing, DVD, mobile phones, TVs, and printing.”

According to a report in this morning's Globes, ECtel (ECTX) announced a collaboration with Amdocs (DOX) in which ECtel will team up with Amdocs’s system integration services to market its FraudView product suite. The software allows advanced detection of fraudulent activity as part of customer acquisition, credit risk management, and new subscriber evaluation processes.

Kudos to Amidex’s Cliff Goldstein who recently shared some time with us on CNBC and spoke about Israeli companies and the market opportunity as a whole. We interviewed Cliff a couple of months ago and it’s worth reading that interview again here.

There is a recent entry to the Israel party called the iShares MSCI Israel Capped Investable Market Index Fund (NYSE: EIS). Recently, we wrote about the EIS being the first ‘real’ Israeli ETF to market. This fund works because it’s got big backing (Barclays’ iShares), exposure to local Israeli firms, and is a departure from previous attempts (see our coverage on the GAF) to package Israeli together with the greater Middle East.