MT Newswires, the little-known network where Vanguard, Schwab and JPMorgan get business news for you

MT Newswires isn’t such a familiar business-news brand as Dow Jones, Reuters, or Bloomberg, but its stories are spreading everywhere.

The Bethesda, Md.-based outfit’s 2,000 daily stories often outnumber reports from the big commercial news services on customer websites for Vanguard Group, Schwab, JPMorgan, Standard & Poor’s, and other investment and financial information sites.

Some recent headlines include:

MT articles are often no more than a handful of short paragraphs, culled from Security and Exchange Commission filings, Wall Street analyst reports, and corporate news releases. The target audience is people who lack the time to mine the explosion of public information on securities and economic news for themselves. The articles are unsigned, written by a network of news staff working from home in the United States and other countries.

MT Newswires is based in a small office in its Washington suburb, owned and run by Lower Merion’s Brooks McFeely, who went to Harriton and Shipley (he keeps a Rocky poster by his desk), who started the business as MidnightTrader Inc. in 1999, around the time he ended his stint as a Navy officer.

McFeely says a billion people have access to MT Newswires stories through the company’s media agreements.

“We are global fact aggregators,” McFeely said. “We cover everything that really affects tradable assets and license the news to financial institutions to serve up to desktop and mobile clients. We cut through the noise to find material information and report it as quickly and in as concise a form as possible.”

Ted Merz, who as head of Bloomberg LP’s product group inked a deal with McFeely to carry MT Newswires on Bloomberg’s global network of securities-trading terminals, is a fan. “It is high-quality; it is accurate; it is fast, and in many cases, it covers corporate news that is not covered by other organizations,” Merz said.

MT doesn’t produce CEO and investor profiles, trading tips, sweeping columns by world influencers, or investigations.

Instead, McFeely “has built a remarkable company that very much flies under the radar screen” by writing the day-to-day company and industry stories, which regional papers have mostly stopped covering, and the big global financial news services don’t headline, added Merz, who left Bloomberg in 2022 and started a ghostwriting firm, Principals Media.

“There’s no secret here: [McFeely] figured out, if you cover John Deere’s new factory or Honeywell’s layoffs, day in and day out, that critical information is a great business,” Merz concluded. “He took advantage of a gap in the market and provides a quality service that others overlook.”

To be accused of merely “rewriting press releases” is considered an insult in traditional newsrooms, where reporters pride themselves on digging beyond corporate or government official stories.

But Merz and others familiar with MT say the act of stripping confusing, jargon-ridden verbiage to make key points quickly in a predictable format is a service worth paying for.

MT Newswires sales are in the low tens of millions of dollars a year, according to industry sources. That compares to yearly revenues of between $500 million and $600 million each, for Dow Jones, which is a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and the Associated Press, the U.S. news cooperative. Reuters’ and Bloomberg’s parent companies each sell billions’ worth of news and data annually to corporate and media users.

Unlike many other media organizations, the company does not focus on individual subscribers or advertising.

“We dabbled in both these models when we first started, but we quickly realized there was no way we could survive the market vagaries of these revenue streams,” said Keith Lanigan, MT Newswires’ executive editor, who was McFeely’s first hire. “Instead, we moved to a licensing model that has served us well, licensing our news across most of the major retail and institutional trading houses in the U.S.,” and more recently in Europe and Asia.

“MT has a very solid, profitable foundation for growth and expansion. It’s been explosive growth since I joined, in the past year a half,” said Weston Walker, who left Politico to serve as MT’s head of partnerships.

“We might not be as well-known to the general public as Dow Jones or Reuters, but the users engaged in finance are using our news on a very regular basis,” Walker added. “Every article we produce is time-stamped, ticker-tagged, metadata- and category-coded,” making it easier to process through artificial intelligence programs.

But McFeely says there are no plans to replace human reporters: “We can’t rely on robots or automated systems to put that information out,” he said. Computer programs may be good at pulling keywords and thoughts from fat research reports, but “journalists are really good at sniffing at source material and finding the sources that need to be told.”

McFeely has a financial-family background: His stepfather, Thomas E. Beach, is a well-known Philadelphia stock investor, formerly a senior member in the West Conshohocken investment firm Miller Anderson & Sherrerd, now part of Morgan Stanley.

McFeely says he began the first of a small constellation of finance-related businesses, of which MT Newswires has been the most successful, while he was still on active duty at the Navy’s former Brunswick, Maine, air station. A retired Boston securities lawyer he met on a plane helped raise $650,000 to launch the company, with Boston-based mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments, then Vanguard’s rival, as its first big client.

McFeely says he’s hired veteran reporters from Bloomberg, Reuters, and Dow Jones at competitive salaries. He declined to make journalists below top management available for interviews but adds that MT has suffered little turnover. The company currently has more than 200 full-time employees.

With sales growth “north of 20% a year,” MT is the kind of start-up that attracts premium-priced offers to buy the business.

But McFeely says he has no plans to sell: “I love what we are doing.”