Multex.com Gets the Nod from Intuit

Online investment research network Multex.com (Nasdaq: MLTX) has made a lot of noise since it went public in March, and the company announced another significant partnership on Wednesday.

Multex, which provides free and premium research for institutional and individual investors, has agreed to a multiyear deal with financial software company Intuit (Nasdaq: INTU) to become the exclusive provider of brokerage research for Intuit’s Quicken.com site. Multex.com will also provide exclusive research to the financial channels of all Quicken.com partner sites, including AOL.com (NYSE: AOL), Excite (Nasdaq: XCIT), Prodigy (Nasdaq: PRGY) and Webcrawler.

Earlier in the month, Multex.com announced a deal that made it the exclusive anchor tenant providing brokerage research for America Online’s personal finance channel. Multex.com is also featured on CompuServe, which is owned by AOL.

More than 1 Million Research Reports

The new partnership will launch in mid-May, with Multex.com’s broker research headlines integrated into the quotes and research area on Quicken.com.

“Multex.com’s offering is a natural extension of the stock research available on Quicken.com,” said Roy Rosin, director of marketing for the Quicken site. “Our goal is empower users to make confident investment decisions by helping them make sense of the data.”

Multex.com provides online access to more than 1 million research reports (on more than 15,000 companies) that are published by approximately 450 investment banks. Quicken.com users will also have access to research from brokerage firms and other research firms via Multex.com’s service.

More than 700,000 investors, including mutual fund and portfolio managers, have access to Multex.com’s services. Multex.com also operates the Multex Investor Network, an online community that has grown to over 290,000 members since its launch in November 1998.

Record Usage for TurboTax

Wednesday was a big day for Intuit all around. The company also announced record usage of its top-selling TurboTax and MacInTax tax preparation programs this year, with more than 4.1 million copies sold. Also significant was that more than 1.6 million returns were filed electronically using Intuit’s software this year, compared to 689,000 last year.

Stock Impact

Multex.com stock closed up 4-1/4 to 53-1/8, after being as high as 59-3/4 on Wednesday. The stock could get another boost today. After the close of trading on Wednesday, Multex.com reported first-quarter revenues of $5.03 million (US$) — 85 percent higher than a year ago.

Shares of Intuit also had a nice gain on Wednesday, climbing 3 to close at 83.