Thursday, September 9, 2010

Invitation to Tea at the Financial Times

I don't usually run free ads but this one intrigued me.
The FT is obviously doing deep research for some product or service, more power to 'em.
You try waking every morning to the spectre of battling Bloomberg, Dow Jones and Thompson/Reuters in the information wars.
This seemed a natural for about 1/4 of our readership (the rest being journalists, hedgies, wirehouses, the hyperintelligent, folks who like pictures of obese felines* and various regulatory and legislative bodies).
Plus if one of our readers attends I'll try to wangle a first person interview.
Here's the pitch from FT Alphaville:
A once in a life time offer. Unlikely to be repeated.
Do you day trade?
Do you take a short view when investing?
Do you trade in a range of asset classes on a short term basis?
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then we would welcome you to join us for ‘Tea with the FT’.
We want investors, like yourself, to join us on 29th September at 3:30pm at the FT offices, One Southwark Bridge, London SE1 9HL (nearest station London Bridge).
We would like to discuss how you currently get information, data and tips both on-line and in print format to help in your trading. Where do you get this and how can the FT help? Do you need different kinds of information or tools? What services do you need on your mobile or Blackberry?
We want to ensure that we understand your needs so we can develop solutions for them. This is an “off the record” event which will enable us to shape tools that can help you trade more effectively. The discussion will last approximately two hours and all participants will receive a thank you gift for their time.
If you are interested in coming to meet us to share your views please respond to patrick.sungbahadoor@ft.com by Monday 13th September.
We will then send you an official invitation with more details.
And before anyone asks we have no idea what the gift is.
So there you go. Trade some time for a chance to figure out the FT's security set-up reverse engineer what one of the premier information companies is up to.

*This was the most popular post in January: "Obama: 'Fat-cat' bankers owe help to U.S. taxpayers (BAC; C; GS; JPM; WFC)" .

Pictures of giant German rabbits remain on our all-time top ten posts list:
Totally off-topic: Kentucky Fried North Korea