I went to the 14th Wedwednesday Social Mixer. The interview was with Chris Justice, the MD of Quamnet.com. A financial service portal.

I am always kinda interested to know how they have survived the dot-com bust and still hanging around today. Moreover, their contents are not free. It’s subscription based.

I have seen many financial portal sprung up in malaysia during year 2001-2002. Many have gone and those who survived today have turned themselves into an I.T. solution provider company. After the bust, most of the financial portal springs up were from stock brokerage house.

I asked about three questions - 1) does their research help me if I am a technical trader 2) how many event they do in a month 3) does their live chart able to port with product like tradestation or metastock charting software.

With the answer given by Chris, I can pretty much sum up (I am guessing) that Quamnet.com derived most of their revenue from events managing, magazine advertising and most probably funds managing (I saw they have many division listed on their site). Subscription services probably contributed less than 20% of the company revenue (Again, I am guessing). They are basically a media company leveraging on stock market research as a front end tools.

It really reaffirms my belief that to be successful on the internet space, you do need a mixture of off-line business model. Solely relying on the internet will only bring death.

There was a lady asking why Quamnet.com does not move up another step. I think she meant Quamnet should provide online trading. If it’s online trading, I can only say…don’t tread that water. Quamnet will never be able to compete with the like of Interactivebrokers.com. These guys lived and breathe on online trading. Quamnet will never be able to compete on price or match Interactivebrokers.com robust infrastructure.

Anyway, it’s good to know Quamnet are successful in their own rights. To be around since 1999 is a tremendous success.

Popularity: 39% [?]