The LSE Directory / Data providers
MarketWatch is a financial news and market-data website operated by Dow Jones & Company, providing real-time and delayed stock quotes, market summaries, an economic calendar, and stock and fund screeners alongside business journalism covering equities, currencies, commodities and personal finance. Free tools include a customizable watchlist, a portfolio tracker, and the Virtual Stock Exchange, a simulated-trading game that lets users test strategies with fake money and run classroom or group contests without capital at risk. Since October 2020, much of its original reporting and its premium newsletters sit behind a metered paywall, while quotes, charts and headline news remain free. Within the retail financial-media category, MarketWatch is aimed at individual investors and personal-finance readers rather than institutional trading desks, and it bundles its data tools (quotes, screeners, watchlists) with editorial coverage rather than selling them as a standalone feed. Paid tiers layer subscriber-only newsletters onto the free site: the Hulbert Financial Digest suite tracks the real-world performance of investment newsletters, Retirement Weekly covers retirement planning, and ETF Trader focuses on exchange-traded-fund strategy. As part of Dow Jones, it sits alongside The Wall Street Journal, Barron's and Investor's Business Daily, and its subscription bundles are commonly cross-sold with those titles. MarketWatch launched October 30, 1997 as CBS.MarketWatch.com, a joint venture between Data Broadcasting Corporation and CBS News, run by Larry Kramer with Derek Reisfield as co-founder and chairman; Thom Calandra was its first editor-in-chief. It went public in January 1999 at $17 a share and closed its first trading day near $130, a market capitalization above $1 billion on roughly $7 million in annual revenue, a case frequently cited as emblematic of dot-com-era valuations. Dow Jones & Company acquired MarketWatch in January 2005 for approximately $519 million, or $18 a share; Dow Jones itself has been a News Corp subsidiary since 2007. The site is headquartered in New York and has been led editorially by Mark DeCambre since March 2022. In September 2025, MarketWatch ran its first brand advertising campaign in nearly three decades, "Don't Short Yourself," a multimillion-dollar push across TV, out-of-home, digital and audio built with creative agency Mother and aimed at younger, Gen Z readers; the company said its paid-subscriber base had doubled over the prior three years to a "mid six-figures" total. Third-party analytics firm Similarweb estimated the site drew roughly 30 million visits a month as of mid-2026.
