Remember what I was saying about Stockgroup Information System’s (SWEB) wireless service - MarketStream - being a potential big improvement for the company’s top line? Today’s news is an example of why I thought so. They just found a big partner who will be promoting the service overseas.

The story itself is simple enough - Norwegian company Trigcom AS will be promoting Stockgroup’s financial data platform called MarketStream - a package specifically designed to bring equity market data and quotes to wireless devices such as a BlackBerry.

As far as the caliber of potential partners in Norway, I’d say they pretty much found the ideal one. Trigcom specializes in BlackBerry technology, and has a few hundred corporate customers (each of which presumably has multiple BlackBerry users). Aside from tapping those current customers first, I’m confident being able to offer such a service will also open doors to a few new financial-business customers.

Though the press release didn’t explicitly say it, I think this is ultimately a subscription revenue sharing deal. And despite not knowing the exact details of any of their recent deals (Stockgroup forged a similar deal with Reuters), I think it’s safe to say even just a few hundred users could mean an annual six-figure opportunity. A few thousand users, and I’d say the deal moves into seven figure territory. Just a guess on my part.

That’s not the important part for investors though…at least not in my opinion. There are two key ‘bigger picture’ ideas I see lurking in the news.

First, this is ‘easy money’ for Stockgroup….well, as easy as money can be in this day and age. Stockgroup already designed the software, so there’s no real developmental cost here. Trigcom is doing the promotion, so it’s not like Stockgroup has a big marketing expense there either. In other words, margins are expected to be wide.

Second (and more importantly), I think this partnership plants a seed for parallel relationships in the future. Norway is only one of dozens of countries with capital markets that are developed enough to merit a wireless data service like MarketStream. Once other telecom outfits see what can be done in Norway, I look for them to start shopping the possibility of doing the same in their respective market.

You know what though? As of yesterday, even the Trigcom news isn’t the most interesting thing Stockgroup’s got going on.

Did anybody see SWEB’s volume on Wednesday? The 1.1 million shares we saw trade hands was the highest volume we’d seen in over a year, and the fifth highest volume day ever for the stock. And no catalyst? I smell institutional buying, since most individual investors wouldn’t be buying so boldly just three days after a multi-month low (nor would most people be buying when they see SWEB’s long-term downtrend).

Somebody - or somebodies - with deep pockets may have been waiting for this stock to really get to a deep undervaluation point. And, I’d say the move from a peak of $1.45 to a low of $0.42 (a 71% pullback) more than qualifies as just that. Picking up on an undervalued stock the rest of the market didn’t pick up on, they pounced. 

The question to be asking is obvious - what do they know that nobody else does? It’s mostly a rhetorical question though; the right thing to do may just be to follow their lead.

Here’s the press release.

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