| 30 October 2009

Interactive Data Corporation (IDC) let loose with Q3 earnings after market close yesterday and showed steady improvement over last year. The company grew net income by 17.5% over last year to $43.1 million.

More interesting to us is the performance of the eSignal division, which provides downloadable applications to active individual investors and institutional investors. The active trader segment of the company saw a 7.3% decrease in revenue from Q3 2008 to $20.9 million. Overall subscriptions dropped 1.7% to 57,200.

By comparison, TradeStation Group, Inc. (TRAD) saw a 23% decline in revenue and a 53% decline in net income. Unlike eSignal, which is broker agnostic, TradeStation is also a broker and generates commission fees.

eSignal launched version 10.5 of its software in July of this year. New enhancements included intraday trading history that allows nit-picky traders to look at 12 years worth of minute-by-minute intraday trading activity. The release also included new forward curves and yield curve charts and 50 new data fields. According to the company, "Forward curve charts provide the user with the ability to view pricing on forward contracts for commodities, and the yield curve is typically used to verify the "shape" of the economy."

More than 50 new data fields were added to the platform, including short interest, float, 12 month % total return, % insider owned, and 200-day moving average.

Driving the increase in revenues and net income for IDC were improvements to its fixed income evaluations and reference data products, especially in Europe. Given this performance the company raised guidance for net income for Q4.