HyperFeed says the deal will result in a gain of $5.6 million and a corresponding increase of stockholders equity in the period the transaction is closed, with an additional $2.2 million gain to be realised as milestones are met.

The divestment follows the recent sale of the company's PCQuote.com Internet subsidiary and is in line with HyperFeed's strategy to exit the consolidated market data business and move into high-end systems integration and technology sales.

Paul Pluschkell, HyperFeed's president, says recent sales to CBOE, Moneyline Telerate and now Comstock illustrate the demand for managed ticker plant technologies for processing, transmitting and distributing financial data while allowing customers greater control over data sources, performance and costs. comments.

He adds: "By exiting the consolidated data feed business, we currently expect to be able to reduce our overhead by more than $8 million annually. This overhead reduction is comprised primarily of communications, data access and labour costs."

HyperFeed has also entered into a licensing agreement that allows IDC to continue using its customer premise technologies for five years and a transition services agreement for operating its current consolidated ticker plant for one year. In addition, IDC is to license HyperFeed's technologies in order to transition and then provide ongoing services to the purchased contracts.

Stuart Clark, president and chief executive officer of IDC, says: "In addition to receiving our global real time market data feed, these clients will also have access to a host of other services from Interactive Data Corporation, such as corporate actions, end-of-day, descriptive and historical data."

The entire transaction is expected to close on October 31 2003 and is subject to customary closing conditions.