LOOKING BACK: THIS WEEK IN IMT

Primark's Vestek division launched Country Alphas, a global, quantitative analysis system for portfolio managers. Country Alphas was designed to take data from other Primark units such as Datastream and I/B/E/S and use it to compare a portfolio's short-term expected returns to conventional benchmarks. Asset managers would be able to receive this data once a month via the Internet's file transfer protocol or e mail and then use it to calculate their forecasts (October 10, 1997).