Ian Campbell was sick of wasting his valuable time grappling with all the websites, blogs, newsletters, reports and various information found online that related to how to research stocks online.

It just wasn't working. This bothered Campbell, who for three decades has been viewed as a preeminent expert in the rendering of Canadian independent business valuation opinions in large and medium Canadian public and private company shareholder disputes and company valuations. He literally wrote the books on this subject. They are used by professionals all over Canada.

For several years, with the assistance of three investment advisors, each of whom specialize in different industry groups, Ian has researched macro-economic concepts and investment ideas online. He consistently spent more time doing this than he believed should be necessary. At the same time he had to develop financial and market comparators that he could not readily find in one organized place.

Campbell then considered what he had learned in his years of helping clients determine the value of their companies and investments. He concluded that if the most pertinent data was consistently summarized across a focused group of companies, and focused due diligence techniques were applied to those companies in much the way a company acquirer might do, this should lead to considerable time efficiencies and importantly, to a more in-depth knowledge of the companies.

The result, after nearly one year of research and site-building, is a unique site, recently launched in December.

He was especially interested in the 'due diligence' aspect. This was used to get to the heart of the financial matters of these publicly-traded Canadian Junior Mining and Oil & Gas Industries. Campbell and his team developed a patent-pending 'due diligence' questionnaire that includes more than 200 questions organized by three dozen topical headings.

The questionnaire searches company documents by keywords. The responses of each search are linked to company documents. This allows members to directly link to each specific response as it appears in the company's documents. Later, a special search-report is available for the member's review and follow-up.

Members have an opportunity to quickly and systematically learn a great deal about an individual company without having first to read voluminous corporate documents

Now here is where I think it really gets interesting. Members quickly learn what the company has not disclosed that may be important to their own work. All questions that do not yield a response to the special key words and phrases search are reproduced in an abbreviated 'follow-up questionnaire'. Often the questions that weren't answered are as ' if not more ' important as those that were.

It has taken nearly one year of hard work to find out what the individual investor and the Investment Advisers wanted; then to organize it in one place so they could find what they need and make their own investment decisions. So far, it looks like Campbell has hit the nail right...on the head.

©Copyright, R.W. MacNaughton, 2007