Alterian Share Discussion Threads

[kab7] 19/1/2010 09:02

I'm peeved as well. Should have sold on the directors sells. I though hard about selling yesterday, but somehow reasoned that with higher tax being brought into UK, this was the reason they are selling, to get cash through the tax system before 50% comes in.

Also, did they know about the sales slowdown before they sold? If they did, wouldn't that be illegal. If I was a director, I would have known.

But if this is the case and I was a director, I would have sold after making this material fact public knowledge.

[friendzarin] 19/1/2010 08:47

Looks like your right there Blubelle.

From the IMS

'Following a promising start to the quarter several substantial new business contracts that were expected to be closed in the UK and Europe at the end of December were deferred out of the Company's current financial year by customers due to economic conditions'.

Director sells of c 1Mil were on 30th November at £1.82 when the share price was some way over £2 that timing takes them very close to smelly territory

[bluebelle] 19/1/2010 08:27

Never ignore large, multiple Director sells is what I've learned from this !

[nurdin] 19/1/2010 08:25

yes having read it closely...it may have been.But much depends on Q4...as usual

I took some profit at 190p however

[smarm] 19/1/2010 08:23

nurdin - it's a profit warning....

S

[devonlad] 19/1/2010 08:09

Drop way overdone, good buying opp!

[rivaldo] 19/1/2010 08:07

Agreed bigbigdave. I can understand people being nervous, as much depends on Q4 as always. But ALN have delivered before, and anyone investing here should be aware of that anyway.

ALN has high recurring revenue, high net cash, a fast-growing global business - and the possibility of recovery in the UK too. I wonder if the snow from mid-Decmber onwards affected the sign-offs? Hopefully these will now fall into Q4.

Above all, even if EPS was to come in below forecasts at say 13p you'd hardly say ALN was over-valued given the prospects and fundamentals.

[bigbigdave] 19/1/2010 08:02

Mark down a little overdone.

[mrmerkin] 19/1/2010 07:20

last paragraph does it for me, especially if the US can manage a half decent recovery. We seem to be in a bit of a tight range at the moment (187.75 to 192) if i am correct, lets hope we can break to the upside today.

[nurdin] 19/1/2010 07:15

Yes dave :o)

Quite impresssive but as usual full year outcome dependent on Q4 performance...a few ifs and buts there...

[bigbigdave] 19/1/2010 07:09

wonder why nurdin?.......... because that IMS was on its way 8-)

[nurdin] 18/1/2010 15:38

Interesting that the price didnt flinch on that 10k sell....wonder why :o)

[friendzarin] 17/1/2010 12:16

Looking forward to Tuesday's interim management statement.

Extract from Techinvests December issue published on its website.Old news now I know but we should expect to see the then price quoted exceeded once the ims is digested.

Alterian 209.25p
(ALN; AIM, Tech Software & Services)
Results for the six months to September 30
showed revenue up 40% to £14.43m against
£10.32m in the first half of 2009. Gross
margin rose to 89%. Operating costs
increased, reflecting a full period of the costs
acquired with Mediasurface in July 2008 as
well as investment in product development
and distribution. Loss before tax reduced to
£0.2m (2008: £2.2m). Cash remains strong at
£7.3m (12.5p per share) after funding costs
and working capital associated with the
acquisition of Techrigy of £0.7m.
Alterian said that the integration of Techrigy
has been completed successfully and benefits
are coming through as anticipated. Cross selling
revenue between Alterian and Mediasurface
customer and partner base are also meeting
expectations. At a constant exchange rate, the
North American business grew by 18% (2008:
15%). Revenues in the UK, Europe and Asia
Pacific increased by 37%, reflecting the
acquisition of Mediasurface.
Alterian also announced that its web
analytics product, WebJourney, is entering
the final phases of testing and is expected to
be generally available early in 2010. The
Company's geographical and market reach
has been extended with 17 partners signed in
the first half, taking the total number to 180.
The Mediasurface acquisition has helped
to increase recurring revenues in the business
and the new products provide strong support
for Alterian's growth strategy. Hold.

[cockneyrebel] 13/1/2010 07:54

yep - sorry - can't read my own scribble here :-)

CR

[gconvery] 12/1/2010 15:58

Statement is next Tuesday CR ;-)

[cockneyrebel] 12/1/2010 15:53

I think tomorrow's statement should be rather good - Panmure have been spot on recently.

CR

[bluebelle] 11/1/2010 18:09

...certainly quite a solid technical pattern forming in the run up to the statement.

[rivaldo] 11/1/2010 15:01

Trading statement out in 8 days on the 19th. Looking forward to it :o))

[bluebelle] 07/1/2010 20:31

samenic - 6 Jan'10 - 20:40 - 1188 of 1189

Yes but let's be honest, it never helps when several Directors sell at the same time just before the close season. Director buys and sells are on most investor check lists and no institution would buy when several Directors are selling, unless there is a very good reason - tax avoidance for example.

Whenever it happens, price weakness follows.

[rivaldo] 07/1/2010 18:35

This guy's pretty keen on ALN:



"Alterian Upgrades SM2 to Enhance Social Media Monitoring Performance and Capabilities with Release 4.3
by Bill Ives
January 7, 2010 at 3:13 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Last July Alterian acquired Techrigy and its SM2 social media monitoring solution. I have used Techrigy, liked it, and wrote about them on this blog (see Techrigy Provides Comprehensive Social Media Monitoring). So I was interested to speak with Joe Stanhope, Vice President of Platform Strategy, Alterian, about where they are taking SM2. The 4.3 release of SM2 focuses on enhanced performance and scalability through more than 140 updates in architecture design, infrastructure investments and new features.

Joe said that Alterian has been focusing more on the execution side of enterprise marketing and purchased Techrigy to enhance their analytics capabilities to complement the execution capabilities. They plan to both continue to develop SM2 as a robust standalone web monitoring tool and integrate it with their Alterian Integrated Marketing Platform. The Integrated Marketing Platform serves marketing efforts at an enterprise level and has such features as the web content management, email marketing, web analytics, and campaign management. The planned integration of SM2 with this platform is part of a growing trend to bring social media monitoring into market facing enterprise applications.

In the 4.3 SM2 release they focused on upgrades that will make it more enterprise ready, address scalability and improve performance. In this context they addressed administration, workflow, reporting, and the backend technology. To enhance workflow, additional list management tools for search results, automatic assignment of results based on search criteria, distribution of notes to assigned team members, default page and language translation configurations were added. They also enhanced reach and speed for initial and subsequent searches in profile, language and country filter searches, and incremental searches. SM2 supports many languages in content collection and four for sentiment analysis: English, Spanish, German, and Dutch. They have plans to add more in both cases.

Joe said that Alterian stores all of the conversations it collects to the tune of about 10 – 15 million a day. They now have over 3 billion stored conversations, likely many that you and I have had. They keep data storage in-house and are constantly expanding this capability. They now plan to move the SM2 infrastructure into their main Alterian data centers. There are three major ones around the world for better global coverage.

Future upgrades to SM2 include improving regional content collection at the many online communities that are growing outside the US. They provide new releases every two months with some significant new features slotted for 2010.

Having recently read the Forrester report, Text Analytics Takes Business Insight to New Depths, I asked Joe about the difference between SM2 which collects data, helps organize it and provides sentiment analysis and the text analytic tools that have a version of these same capabilities. Joe said that both have a role and Alterian partners with some of the tools mentioned in the Forrester report such as Clarabridge. A tool like SM2 that is focused on social media monitoring has more out-of-the-box reporting, can more easily look at issues like share of voice and key influencers, and respond back to what is discovered. A text analytic tool requires more manual work to address such issues.

I think that Alterian made a great move to acquire SM2 and they are taking good care of its continued development. They have expanded both the development teams and the customer services staff while retaining many of the original people. I look forward catching up again after their new feature set is released."

[samenic] 06/1/2010 20:40

Yep and for those that noticed the sales were structured and organised in such a way that l doubt it reflects on the ongoing performance of the company.

[cockneyrebel] 06/1/2010 19:45

Agree.

CR

[nurdin] 06/1/2010 19:13

I think most potential investors are fretting about the recent Directors sells...just in advance of their trading statement.I for one am not too bothered as Directors sell for a whole variety of reasons. Besides they could be had by the FSA for insider trading if there was anything amiss.

I fully expect the trading statement to be bullish and to confirm in line performance if not ahead.

[rivaldo] 06/1/2010 19:04

Interesting mention in a blog which outlines the potential for ALN - 84% of survey respondents who've adopted social media don't measure their social media programs...(yet!)



"5 Near Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

When it comes to businesses leveraging the social web to communicate with customers and improve brand awareness, there's some good news and there's some bad news.

The good news: 86% of professionals have adopted social media in some way, according to a recent survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education.

The bad news: A whopping 84% of survey respondents who've adopted social media don't measure their social media programs.

Even worse: 40% weren't even sure they could monitor social media ROI.

Thankfully, there are a host of free or low cost tools available to help companies and organizations track social media success. Use one or more of these 5 social media monitoring tools to gauge how well your efforts are working....

....5. Techrigy SM2

SM2 is a software solution designed specifically for PR and Marketing Agencies to monitor and measure social media. The "freemium" version of this full featured social media monitoring service allows you to create up to 5 profiles and each query is limited to storing up to 1,000 search results. There are many features with setup and reports as you can see in the screen shot below. Along with standard help and FAQ resources, there's a Ning powered Techrigy social network or Community of users that you can tap into and share information.

Incidentally, we did an interview with Connie Bensen, Director of Social Media and Community Strategy at Alterian, the company that owns TechrigySM2 earlier this month."

[rivaldo] 06/1/2010 12:59

BlackRock (i.e Merrill Lynch) have gone above 12% now with 7.2m shares:



Perhaps they have a good feeling about the trading statement :o))