A 43-year professional career in the Australian financial sector, including financial journalism, stock broking, investment and securities market research, venture capital and business consulting.

In 2003 he helped set up News Bites Pty Ltd - where he is now CEO and a 24% shareholder - to provide stock market news and data to Factiva, the news aggregator division Dow Jones.

News Bites is among the top 20 suppliers of data, by global sales revenue, to Factiva. Other major customers include Thomson Reuters and Lexis Nexis.

The company operates a joint venture, based in Pune, India, which collects data from 90 stock markets around the world, covering 40,000 listed companies.

Prior to setting up News Bites Howard specialised in the micro cap and small cap sectors and has been a director of several investee companies that were listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.

Along the way his research company had to be placed into liquidation – and this provided the lessons needed for the success of News Bites.

He now has a lower time commitment to News Bites and proposes to devote time once again to small company advising, consulting and capital rising.