Capital IQ Acquires TheMarkets.com For $300M

Capital IQ, a provider of market analytics to investment banks and private equity firms, will pay $300 million to acquire rival TheMarkets.com. TheMarkets.com, founded in 2000, is a joint venture of several Wall Street banks including Goldman Sachs GS and JPMorgan Chase JPM as a way of distributing their sell-side research to institutional investors, the Wall Street Journal reported. Capital IQ was acquired by the Standard & Poor's unit of McGraw Hill MHP for $200 million in 2004, the Journal reported. The company has 4,200 clients. Other banks that hold stakes in TheMarkets.com include Bank of America BAC, Credit Suisse CS, Citigroup C, Morgan Stanley MS, Deutsche Bank DB and UBS UBS, according to the Journal. Capital IQ competes with firms such as Bloomberg, FactSet FDS and Thomson Reuters TRI.