Thomson acquires digiTrade

The goal is to combine digiTrade's service with content from Thomson, which delivers financial data through several companies, including First Call, Investext and Securities Data Corp. "Thomson has typically focused on the institutional community, providing research to another broker. This relationship promotes the notion of providing certain optimized research for the individual investor," said Ray Kingman, president of Thomson Consumer Products.

Financial terms of the deal weren't released.

Kingman said that the companies have been working together over the past year to link together their content, offering real-time stock quotes to mutual fund investors. In the future, digiTrade will be able to deliver the quotes along with research from Thomson's companies.

One analyst termed the buy "a big deal," because it would give Thomson access to digiTrade's discount, retail and institutional brokerages customers.

"digiTrade's strength is in its touch-tone trading systems, not in their Internet systems ... but they do have a large and growing customer base. Thomson will now have important contacts to that base ... and the ability to integrate their financial content into their trading systems," said Steven Hall, senior analyst at Gomez Advisors in Concord, Mass.