Morningstar quietly adds QuoteSpeed to its advisory menu

Morningstar QuoteSpeed, an online application which has been available in beta form since last October, has now officially become part of the company’s lineup of products for advisers.
I’ve been using the service for a week now and it has a simple and intuitive interface with lots of modules that can be dragged, dropped, and easily reorganized to suit an adviser’s daily routine.
As part of the offering, advisers receive streaming real-time trading data provided by BATS, the third largest of the American exchanges by trading volume (accounting for 10% of a day’s typical market activity).
(Click here for a slide-show of Morningstar QuoteSpeed.)
In addition, the application provides customizable quote displays, charting, qualitative analysis, news, and alerts that are available either in a stand-alone application or that can be accessed as part of several other Morningstar products.
Advisers starting up the application for the first time enter into a blank slate that they can populate with modules from a large selection. Barring that, they can select one of several pre-built workspaces that Morningstar has put together.
Once you’ve started using the application you can move modules around at will, add new ones, size them to fit your preferences — simply by dragging corners or edges — all within an online application (not desktop software running on your PC).
Advisers can monitor a portfolio of securities using the Watchlist feature that has a quote window, including a lot of fundamental data. You can, in turn drop particular securities from a list onto charts, news, and other windows within the application. QuoteSpeed charts provide intra-day and historical price, as well as volume and display them in candlesticks, OHLC bars and other chart formats, many of them with additional drill down data appearing when you hover your crosshairs over a spot on the chart.
The application also remembers all your settings, including your modules, their order and the particular securities and other instruments you are tracking no matter where you log in from (it is not relying on cookies to save this data either).
“With this product we’ve tried to fill a need among advisers for a solution with a lower entry point in terms of cost,” explained Morningstar senior product manager Brian Delegan during a demonstration at InvestmentNews.
The standalone price for QuoteSpeed is $1,080 per year. For the time being though, existing subscribers of Morningstar’s Advisor Workstation, Principia, and Office products can add the basic QuoteSpeed service at a discounted rate of $50 per month (adding additional real time exchange data, for example will significantly raise the price).
Morningstar also plans to fully integrate QuoteSpeed into the Advisor Workstation product in 2011.
“We heard in feedback from RIAs and broker-dealer firms that they had only limited and expensive options when it came to desktop access to real time quotes and monitoring and many were actually turning to Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance for this,” said Mr. Delegan.
Using a heat maps module on QuoteSpeed for example, an adviser can follow the market throughout the day and see immediately where to take action to protect or boost client holdings.
The data feeds taken into QuoteSpeed come from over 160 sources globally and include key equity and derivative exchanges, as well as treasury market contributors. Morningstar maintains its own ticker plants which process data directly from exchanges.
For those unaware, QuoteSpeed has actually been around in one form or another for 20 years, and it’s been used by thousands in the financial services community. The underlying technology for Morningstar’s version of the application came from that company’s acquisition of Tenfore Systems back in 2008 (In fact the various real time feeds going into QuoteSpeed and also out to 500 clients in the form of the Morningstar Real-Time Data product also came out of that acquisition).
Aside from how intuitive and easy to navigate Quotespeed is it has also been engineered from the start to run on any browser. The underlying coding has been done to render in basic HTML and not rely on any particular web service platform like Flash. For example, I saw an immaculate presentation of the app on an Apple iPad that ran natively on its Safari browser with no tweaking required.
For additional information visit QuoteSpeed homepage.