Tracour, a company building a web-based tool to track analyst rankings of stocks, has raised a $335,000 seed round of funding. The company expects to enter a beta period in July.
The modest seed round was led by Unlimited Capital, and participated in by angel Brad Wardell.
The company performs two key functions: tracks financial ratings information in real-time and frames past ratings data in historical context. Tracour wants to know which ratings groups are the most influential for each stock and what impact those ratings have over a set period of time.
Sounds boring? Ratings changes can move the price of a company by quite a bit, especially if a rating cuts across the current consensus. Some ratings have no impact at all. So, if you wanted to trade a stock (say, Google) you’d want to know who to listen to and who ignore. Tracour, provided that it can deliver on its promise, should make that a feasible task.
I’ve gotten a peek at what the company is building, and had a bit of hands on time at TechCrunch Disrupt SF last year (Tracour actually met their lead investor at the event). I’ll dig more deeply into the product once it’s finished. While the guts of Tracour are its most important component, its user interface remains a work in progress.
The company is also notable for its co-founder and CEO Brad Sams, who, along with his duties running the two-man firm, is the managing editor of Neowin, a blog that covers Microsoft closely.
The service won’t start from scratch. Sams told TechCrunch that years of data will be pre-loaded into the system from the start.
Keep in mind that this interface will be replaced with something less Microsoft-cum-2006, but here’s a Tracour widget that shows the impact that a TheStreet buy rating has on Microsoft in a 45-day period:
The chief effect of Tracour should be publicly shaming the incompetent. Not good at rating a firm you cover? Tracour will essentially blow up your spot by ranking your firm low.
Tracour, a BizSpark company, will charge for its product on a subscription basis. I’ll have more once Sams and his co-founder Braeden Petruk kick their product live.
Image by Flickr user Antonio Morales García under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license