The first week of July represents an important anniversary for Alliance News, as it was exactly one year ago that we moved into our Blackfriars newsroom and started publication.
Admittedly, the first few days were more spent opening boxes and picking out just the right tea kettle (our editor is very particular about his kettle) than breaking news.
But in the year since, Alliance News has published an incredible 110,000 news headlines and articles about everything that rattles UK stock prices.
Of those news items, some 75,000 were about companies, with the rest about markets and economics. That’s 30 articles for each and every one of the roughly 2,500 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange. We cover them all, big and small. But some get more virtual ink than others.
Royal Dutch Shell, for example. Alliance News’s unique “aboutness” coding shows that we wrote 116 news items that were primarily about the UK’s largest company by market capitalisation, while a total of 424 news items mentioned Shell in some way, for example a smaller company doing business with Shell.
News coverage is not dictated by size alone though. Vodafone, with a market cap of GBP52 billion, a third of Shell’s GBP155 billion, had 50% more news items written about it – 166 over the course of the year. And mobile phones trump big oil as a talking point. Vodafone had 638 total mentions on Alliance News over the past year, more than double those of Shell. Part of this had to do with one of the biggest-ticket company transactions of the past 12 months: Vodafone’s sale to Verizon of its share in their US joint venture.
Banks continue to dominate business news in the UK, and Alliance News reflected this fixation. Lloyds Banking was mentioned 954 times in our news reports, of which 241 were news items primarily about the state-owned lender. Government stablemate Royal Bank of Scotland was mentioned in 855 articles, with 299 being primarily about RBS.
But truly hogging the headlines over the past year were the pharmaceutical firms. AstraZeneca had 284 news items written about it and 834 mentions, while topping all companies was GlaxoSmithKline, with 370 news items about it and 822 total mentions.
So no average day goes by without at least one news story about Glaxo and at least two mentions.
It helps (if that is the right word) if you have faced allegations of bribery by your sales staff in China in the case of Glaxo or have fended off a trans-Atlantic takeover bid in the case of Astra. But drug makers also issue a steady stream of notices about drug testing, explaining the news volume.
At the other end of the market, with a market capitalisation of just GBP185,000, AIM-listed oil-and-gas investment firm Tern PLC still merited 10 news items about it on Alliance News.
Among the people most mentioned on Alliance News in our first year of operation, the result was, on reflection, unsurprising.
As a wire that prides itself on its small-cap coverage, most of us here just assumed that David Lenigas, the king of AIM, got the most name checks. The chairman of Rare Earth Minerals, AfriAg and Stellar Resources, among others, was mentioned 63 times over the past year, and 224 times if you count the eponymous Leni Gas & Oil.
But another king received almost as many mentions. Justin King was mentioned 54 times over the course of the year, despite recently stepping down as CEO of Sainsbury.
In fact, pipping Lenigas for mentions among corporate leaders was the king of trainers himself, Mike Ashley, with 66 mentions for the founder and deputy chairman of Sports Direct International.
Unsurprisingly, it is politicians and central bankers that are mentioned the most by a financial newswire such as Alliance News, even one that focuses on equities. David Cameron appeared 354 times, beating George Osborne at 308, but neither came close to a certain Canadian with 448 mentions, Mark Carney.
Among non-UK figures, Russian President Vladimir Putin was mentioned more often than any UK political figure, at 484 times, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel made 568 appearances on Alliance News.
But it was the leaders of the world’s leading economy that inevitably produced the most name checks, even on a UK wire. Fed Chair Janet Yellen was mentioned 642 times over the past 12 months, while US President Barack Obama tops the charts with 845 references.
In terms of topics, there were an astounding 8,415 broker rating changes published on Alliance News over the past 12 months. These analysts really need to make up their minds.
Similarly, there were 5,281 director dealings. So much for buy and hold.
The dread words feared by all investors in oil and gas exploration companies – “plugged and abandoned” – were uttered 102 times by Alliance News.
But generally the past year has been a good one for investors. Alliance News journalists apply a sentiment code to their stories when it is clear that a certain piece of news is positive or negative for a company. Over the past year, some 10,700 pieces of news were rated positive for the company involved, compared to only 2,750 rated negative.
Small wonder that the FTSE 100 has gained 7.6% since Alliance News opened shop on a hot summer week 12 months ago, while the AIM All-Share has risen by 13%.