Ocean Tomo is an intellectual property

Intellectual property

Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...

 merchant bank

Merchant bank

A merchant bank is a financial institution which provides capital to companies in the form of share ownership instead of loans. A merchant bank also provides advisory on corporate matters to the firms they lend to....

 that provides financial products and services, including expert testimony, valuation, research, ratings, investments, risk management, and transactions. They are headquartered in Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

, IL

Illinois

Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...

, USA

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. They also have offices in Greenwich, Orange County, San Francisco and Houston. Subsidiaries include Ocean Tomo Risk Management, LLC, Ocean Tomo Asset Management, LLC, OTI Data Networks, LLC, Patent Marking, LLC, and Ocean Tomo Capital, LLC. In addition, Ocean Tomo is the founder of the Intellectual Property Exchange International (IPXI). Their current CEO is James E. Malackowski,

Practice Groups

Ocean Tomo has five main practice groups which include Expert Services (Financial Testimony, Valuation & Surveys), Research (Ocean Tomo PatentRatings system, PatentMarking, and OTI.com), Investments (Asset Management, Ocean Tomo Indexes & Investment Banking), Risk Management, and Transactions.

Auctions

Ocean Tomo introduced the world's first public auctions of patent

Patent

A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

s, trademark

Trademark

A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or...

s and copyright

Copyright

Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...

s. The auctions have also included business method patent

Business method patent

Business method patents are a class of patents which disclose and claim new methods of doing business. This includes new types of e-commerce, insurance, banking, tax compliance etc. Business method patents are a relatively new species of patent and there have been several reviews investigating the...

s, and the rights to Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix

James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix was an American guitarist and singer-songwriter...

's music recordings.

Intellectual Property Stock Index

Ocean Tomo has also pioneered the first stock index based on corporations whose overall market value is in large part due to the value of their patent portfolios. The index is called the "Ocean Tomo 300 Patent Index". The index starts with the 1,000 most liquid securities on U.S. exchanges. Patent-owning companies in this group are divided into 50 style and size groups and ranked by patent value (divined by OT's proprietary system) divided by book value. The six highest ranking securities in each group are selected and weighted by market capitalization. The ranking system assumes that the patent's value is related to its owner's willingness to pay patent maintenance fees. The system reviews 53 factors in a patent document to estimate whether a patent would be renewed. An ETF based on this index trades on AMEX.