MT Newswires is expanding its news offerings

MT Newswires, which provides news to consumers through brokers such as Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade, is expanding its offerings.

The news service has recently added a top news front page that contains the top 10 to 20 stories of that day affecting global economies and commodities.

It’s also been working to include more research along with its news content with a service called Research Connect. It’s looking to extend its coverage of exchange traded funds with a product called Fund Connect. And it’s getting ready to provide content that focuses on earnings estimate changes for companies.

“We’re starting with distribution channels that we already have,” said CEO Brooks McFeely in a telephone interview on Thursday. “Most of the database services already have us, as do most of the self-directed firms in North America and wealth and advisor platforms. We’re leveraging our existing distribution.”

MT Newswires is also looking to launch coverage of Asian equities and commodities such as rubber and palm oil. It hopes to establish sales offices in Singapore and Hong Kong by the end of the year.

“We will be covering anything and everything of significant interest to our clients,” said McFeely.

MT Newswires started in 1999 as a newsletter service but is now distributed by Lexis/Nexus, Morningstar and Thomson Reuters, among others. Its main readers are individual investors and clients of money managers that provide MT Newswires content through their websites.

Although he declined to provide specifics, McFeely said that the company has doubled in size in the past two years and will likely double again in the next two years.

The earnings estimate coverage will “produce information and insight that would provide some really good predictive information that would be obviously coming out ahead of ratings changes,” said McFeely. “We’re hoping to have that out in a week or two.”

MT Newswires has been producing weekly summaries of news affecting exchange traded funds for ETF issuers and has been a “rapidly growing” area for the company, said McFeely. That will expand to cover fund strategies. “That’s great information and news for our clients,” he said.

The new research service is a way for brokers and money managers to make that content more available to their customers, said McFeely. Research is often buried deep inside a broker’s website and “clients don’t know it’s available or can’t find it in a timely basis,” said McFeely.

“We’re working with the independent research providers to alert clients [of] new research from any provider,” he said. “It increases utilization of research that is already there on the platform.”