Tracking stocks of individual companies or all firms in an industry is just a matter of a click thanks to an ‘Industry Watch’ feature introduced by the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Earlier, to track the performance of a sector, one needed to know all the constituent companies and then individually check the stock quote for each company. Else, the user would need to click the ‘peer group’ link in each stock for a few more stock names in the industry to pop up.

The new Industry Watch now displays 80 industries/sectors and all the 6,000 odd listed companies.

Some of the categories include storage, media & peripherals, BPO/KPO, department stores, footwear, forest products and surface transportation.

Explained a BSE official: “With this feature, the user just needs to select, for example, ‘banks’ and the current stock price and trend of all the banking sector stocks will pop up. In one view, the user gets the pricing trend for all companies in a sector. The Heat Map methodology of display gives a colourful picture of how the stocks are performing. All announcements pertaining to the companies in the sector also get displayed along side.”

For categorising companies that are into multiple lines of business, the exchange has decided to consider the criterion of the largest source of revenue for the company. For example ITC, which has diversified interest from FMCG to agri-business to paper products, has been categorised under cigarette and tobacco products, since the segment is the major revenue contributor to the company. The exchange plans to tweak its Web site and mobile offerings some more.

Another BSE official added: “We will be looking at adding additional information in ‘Industry Watch’ page. Recently the ‘Get Quote’ section has been revamped to add an interactive graph and live streaming quotes. BSE's mobile site m.bseindia.com was recently launched to track price updates. The exchange has also launched its app for Windows 8 platform.”

> manisha.jha@thehindu.co.in

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