Seeing The Investment Forest Despite The Trees

The power of the Internet lies in its store of information, but there can be too much of a good thing. For investors mulling a transaction and scouring the Web for the latest news on a stock, the resources available can be overwhelming.

Credit Suisse First Boston is trying to make research easier for its European customers by using an advanced search engine that reads and summarizes vast quantities of information, and then presents the results in a graphic that shows their relevance and relationship to a given set of criteria.

The Web site for the bank's Italian operations, www.credit-suisse.it, uses ClearEvents, the product of Israeli startup ClearForest Corp., to filter a Reuters news feed and analyze company events. "If you want to know what's happening to a company you're interested in, by the time you've read a few weeks of news feeds, you've read a couple hundred documents," says David Chinn, head of marketing and portals at E-investment services, Europe, of Credit Suisse E-business. "This gives you a nice way to navigate that, and understand the context of what's happening to a company."

Credit Suisse, which has 15,000 Italian customers, plans to introduce ClearEvents to its pan-European site, creditsuisse.net, an online investment service targeting affluent investors launched last month. Chinn says the bank would charge customers for different levels of the service.