Microsoft takes 15% stake in Irish Firm

Zignals will address the gap in the market between high net-worth individuals whose portfolio is managed by brokers and day traders who spend all their time online looking for information, according to chief technology officer and co-founder Scott Tattersall.

Zignals Targets Small Investors Armed With New Microsoft Technology

Software writer and one of the founders of Zignals, Scott Tattersall, says that the Microsoft technology allows his company to run extremely complex analysis in a very short space of time. Because of the software's ability to run millions of variables and thousands of highly complex problems in a matter of second means that Zignals can bring technology to individual investors, which would normally be only available to the big investment banks.

The software helps users analyze patterns and build trading strategies, competing with similar programs used by investment banks. The Zignals software may eventually be linked to Microsoft's MSN Web site to help drive traffic, said David Harnett, a senior director at Microsoft. The site is a "natural partner" to sites such as E*Trade Financial Corp., Zignals Chief Executive Officer Pat Brazel said in an interview.

Microsoft Helps Launch Financial Alert Service

Zignals combines available raw data, sifting through and analyzing it in a way that might look familiar to someone who works at a major broker, to deliver the alerts. "We're democratizing access to these services," CEO Pat Brazel said. "We're not talking simple information you can get from Yahoo Finance," he said. "Rather we're talking about strategic events where an investor might be interested in taking a position in a stock if a fairly complex set of events come to pass."

Microsoft has taken a 15pc equity stake in a Dublin technology firm that has launched an advanced online stock information platform that went live yesterday. Microsoft's IP Ventures arm has been working with Zignals for about a year, helping it refine its financial information system that uses the Seattle firm's Microsoft Solver Foundation technology to quickly collate millions of pieces of data from the web.