Thomson First Call

Thomson First Call has provided access to commingled financial research since 1984. Today, Thomson First Call distributes institutional-quality research on more than 34,000 companies in over 130 countries. Thomson First Call is part of the Thomson Financial family of companies. Thomson Financial is a US$1.6 billion provider of data, analysis and information tools to the global investment community, and is a subsidiary of The Thomson Corporation, a leading global provider of integrated information solutions for business and professional customers.

Thomson First Call research originates from about 800 contributing firms, corporate documents and public filings. Roughly 98 percent of U.S. institutional money managers rely on some form of Thomson First Call information. Thomson Financial distributes First Call data through LAN-based applications, Internet-based applications, customer-configured Web-based solutions, leased lines, application program interfaces (APIs), file transfer protocol (FTP) sites and wireless devices. The data is also available on the platforms of 35 third-party distributors worldwide, including Bloomberg, Reuters/Bridge and S&P. Finally, selected Thomson First Call content reaches millions of readers and investors through Thomson's Media Program, which is currently utilized by more than 600 media outlets around the world.

Thomson First Call's seminal service is First Call Notes, which delivers analyst morning meeting notes, intraday research broadcasts and commentary from global sell-side institutions within minutes of the information's release. Hundreds of analysts, including those from all of Institutional Investor's top 20-ranked brokerage firms, contribute an average of 3,000 notes per day to the service. During earnings reporting periods, this daily volume swells to 6,000 notes.

Thomson First Call Notes subscribers may search the database by broker, ticker symbol, company name, portfolio, region, country, industry, headline subject or date range. Among the service's other features are the ability to create up to 200 portfolios which can track up to 2,000 ticker symbols each; alerts notifying subscribers of headlines for the ticker symbols that the subscribers have preselected; and real-time financial and investor-related press releases. More than 50,000 portfolio managers and buy-side analysts in the United States receive First Call Notes. They represent over 2,000 firms, with trillions of dollars in aggregate assets under management.

Another of First Call's flagship products is First Call Real-Time Estimates, which provides access to the forecast measures of more than 775 brokerage firms. This product includes median estimates of analysts' five-year growth rate forecasts for subject companies; analyst-by-analyst and consensus buy/hold/sell recommendations; quarterly, fiscal-year and calendar-year analyst-by-analyst and consensus estimates; actual reported earnings; and company-issued guidelines and footnotes that define the basis for their estimates.