Cambridge-Based Metriplex Plans Portfolio Limit Service Using Alphanumeric Pagers

A Massachusetts start-up, Metriplex Systems, Inc., is the latest firm to propose a portable market monitoring product using alphanumeric pagers. The Metriplex "Stockwatch Plus" service was unveiled at last month's Futures Industry Association meeting in Boca Raton.

Stockwatch Plus will launch in New York by the end of April, says Metriplex president Steve Stutman, with Chicago to follow in a few months. The Cambridge-based firm expects to use two different radio common carriers in New York to provide service in both the 150 and 450 MHz paging bands. The receiver would be a conventional Motorola PMR 2000 alphanumeric pager.

While Reuters and others have operated successful portable quote services overseas using paging technology, previous U.S. efforts to provide such services have been less than spectacular. Chicago-based Scantic and Sunnyvale-based Quote Alert are two that emerged in a flurry of advertising only to disappear.

The most successful portable quote services in the U.S. use FM sideband technology. Lotus's Quotrek, Telemet America's Pocket Quote, and Telerate's PDQ are thought to have an aggregate of almost 20,000 active subscribers. For Lotus and Telemet, most of these are non- professionals who pay less than $100/month.

By Stutman's account, the key to luring professional investors into the portable world is to offer convenience and reliability that FM services can't provide. Pagers, for example, usually outperform FM receivers inside large buildings in congested neighborhoods like Wall ŠStreet. They are also smaller and don't require extension of a whip antenna to get a good signal.

Whether that can translate into hard- or soft-dollar customers willing to pay $100-300/month for a portfolio limit-minding service remains to be seen. Unlike its chief FM competitors, Stockwatch Plus won't pump out real-time prices on the entire universe of U.S. exchange-traded instruments. Instead, it will send a price only when a limit is triggered.

A Stockwatch customer would be provided with some basic PC software, says Stutman, which would allow him to construct a portfolio of five to ten instruments with price and volume limits. That file would then be downloaded to Metriplex's Stratus host, which would compare the limits in real time using Standard and Poor's Ticker III feed. If a limit were hit, details of the trade that triggered the limit would be sent to the customer's pager.

Beyond a flat monthly password fee, the service will be tariffed based on three components: (1) portfolio size, (2) air time, i.e., the number of pages sent, and (3) the number of limit updates. "Obviously I'm not interested in somebody setting limits 25 times a day paying the same amount of money as someone who sets limits once a day or twice a week," says Stutman, who declines to give pricing specifics.

Meanwhile, Metriplex's founders are struggling with the focus of the service. Although it was introduced at a futures industry show and has a clear commodities orientation, it's still called "Stockwatch" and will be launched in New York rather than Chicago. "The name -- because it isn't 'Futureswatch' or what have you -- may not be the best choice and that might change," says Stutman. "It was always the case from the beginning that we always dealt with commodities. It was just that we like the name 'Stockwatch.'"