Last week we hosted a roundtable discussion on the impact of the pandemic on strategy as well as how to plan through uncertainty. Our panel included competitive intelligence and strategy experts from across industries—tech, industrials, and pharma:

• Aki Garrett, Director, Telco Strategic Alliances & Business Development, Lenovo
• Jason Fake, Strategy & Business Development, ITT
• Peter Kenseth, Vice President, Maia Strategy Group

During the webinar the panelists discussed the changes they’d seen over the last 6 months. Our Head of Research and moderator, Nick Mazing, noted that since March companies across sectors had made similar business decisions almost in unison. One example he highlighted was the airline industry where most began disclosing cash burn immediately after the CARES Act. Another example was Wall Street where banks started bringing staff back into offices roughly in the same week. Even car dealers, he noted, appeared to have made decisions in unison, with most rolling out online platforms for sales. “It certainly seems like the importance of Competitive Intelligence, and, frankly, the ability to quickly copy is of much greater importance,” he said.

“In an environment like this,’ said Peter Kenseth, “there is a lot of risk in diverging from the pack, from being an outlier. It demonstrates the importance of being able to track your competitive set.” However, he added that there is opportunity to be found in innovating or doing something different than the competition. “All it takes is recognizing that no one is trying to innovate or be disruptive for someone to be able to make that move and break from the pack.”

Next they discussed best practices, or how to plan through this uncertain time with more certainty. Benchmarking and monitoring competitors and peers ranked high on the list here. 

Aki Garret noted that competitive intelligence is more important now than ever. “Given the access to information and the speed at which technology evolves today, knowing and understanding what’s going on in my industry is crucial.” Aki added, “competitive intelligence supports and influences all aspects of what I do from strategy to business planning and execution. It’s really important for me to know what our competitors are doing and how we can differentiate.”

In his recent blog post, Jason Fake discussed the importance of keeping on top of news and trends in the 90 days between earnings calls. The current environment in the midst of the uncertainty caused by a global pandemic has only exacerbated this need. As Jason wrote, “If there was ever a testament as to why it’s essential to stay on top of your industry as well as the actions / performances of your peers, customers, and suppliers, it’s the last 90 days. Don’t fly half blind!”

The crisis has accelerated the future. Staying ahead of the pack requires access to the information that drives strategy and decisions that enable companies to win. 

You can listen to the full webinar on-demand here. If you’d like to learn more about how Sentieo can help you gain the insights you need to win, contact us.

The post How Competitive Intelligence Drives Strategy in Uncertain Times appeared first on Sentieo.

Jason Fake is Strategy & Business Development at ITT.

At a prior company, a recent acquisition resulted in the parent’s entrance into a new industry. In the early months post-acquisition, processes and methodologies were being put into place to integrate with the parent’s operating model and set of deliverables and reporting. The monthly goals forecast for the portfolio was built from a bottoms-up analysis of the pipeline (stage, propensity-to-close, etc.), and produced a figure of X-thousand units. After soundly beating the forecast, the company – naturally in high spirits – was presenting to senior leadership when they were asked the following question:

Was our performance good?

When I think about the topic of flying half blind, I am reminded of this moment; the Portfolio Management team had generated a forecast, which the operation crushed, but nobody in the room could confidently answer how the performance stacked up against industry benchmarks, much less against our peers. The company had absolutely spent its early months operating half blind.

BACKDROP

COVID-19 has impacted virtually all industries, some of which have been completely upended. The impact has varied in intensity and duration across geographies; certain end-markets are recovering more quickly than others, and there are areas that have been boosted as a result of the current pandemic. It is under these circumstances that we look at some of the harder hit areas: commercial aerospace, industrial manufacturing, and oil & gas.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 90 DAYS

It’s roughly 90 days between earnings calls. These fairly structured windows into an organization’s financial performance, thought processes, and go-forward actions contain a wealth of information.

In late January / early February, the biggest concern for Commercial Aerospace was the 737 MAX issue. Outside of those companies with operations in China, COVID-19 was mostly an afterthought; even then, the impact was usually treated as an isolated blip. Companies reported record quarters / years in categories ranging from revenue to OM to Adjusted EPS, and their FY2020 guidance – outside of commercial aerospace – was good news for their investors.

In late April / early May, the biggest concern across industries (and especially Commercial Aerospace) was COVID-19. This was no longer just a China problem – in fact China had mostly recovered – this had become a global pandemic. Companies withdrew their FY2020 guidance, provided an impacted financial performance along with the proclamation that the next quarter would be worse, and then spent the bulk of the call talking about three things: safety actions, liquidity (incl. CapEx freezes, credit revolvers, debt, burn rates, etc.), and preserving margins (restructuring actions, cost cuts, decremental targets, etc.).

Think about that change. The A&D peers went from bragging about record operating margins and cash flow to targeting decremental margins and maintaining liquidity. In 90 days.

THE NEED FOR STRATEGY AND COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE

Clearly, this didn’t all happen on day 90, and it didn’t all happen at once. There were many events (remember negative oil prices?), some quite impactful, that happened in the interim. Social distancing and travel restrictions were imposed in the U.S. in March, and unemployment quickly spiked. In addition, as the different geographies found themselves at different phases and trajectories, the actions of their governments and their businesses varied significantly. This sent shocks throughout the supply chain.

If there was ever a testament as to why it’s essential to stay on top of your industry as well as the actions / performances of your peers, customers, and suppliers, it’s the last 90 days. Don’t fly half blind!

Some of the questions to consider, and examples of reactions:

1. What exposures do I have, and how diversified is my end market mix?
   1. Industrial Conglomerates such as 3M and Honeywell pivoted toward their medical end markets and focused on PPE production
   1. High-speed data, industrial automation, and warehousing are seeing some intensified focus
   1. The recent restructuring actions by GE were most heavily borne by its Aviation division
2. What are the impacts to the supply chain? Who is open / taking deliveries, what are the OEMs doing?
   1. In aerospace, both Boeing and Airbus have announced multiple production decreases
   1. As businesses in different geographies have had to comply – or seek exception to – their government’s mandates, the ability to manufacture / ship / receive goods along the supply chain has been affected, and companies have had to navigate around these impacts
3. What shape will the recovery take (V, U, L)? What are my plans for each of these circumstances?
   1. As mentioned earlier, there is a heavy focus on liquidity. Companies are being very judicious with their CapEx, and have scaled back most of their discretionary spending
   1. Some high-profile mergers, acquisitions, and JVs have been scrapped; M&A activity is down
   1. As companies try to understand what the level of demand will look like throughout and post-recovery, they are making the strategic decisions to align capacity with that demand

EYES WIDE OPEN

Given the need for up-to-date competitive intelligence and an evolving strategy, the natural question is how to get started. Consider this a primer, and by no means an exhaustive list:

1. Transcripts, 10-Qs / Ks, presentations, and press releases (Credit to Stacy Turnof for the summary she provided during the “Earnings Calls Perfected” Webinar in June; I’ve expanded on it in a few areas, but her recommendations were really spot-on)
   1. Create a list of peers, customers, and proxies for the pertinent industries / end markets,  both direct and indirect
   1. Key issues: What’s company-specific, what’s industry-wide, what are companies a-z doing, what are the consensus actions, and where are the disconnects
   1. On the transcripts, don’t restrict yourself to the earnings calls; there are transcripts of Investor Day presentations, Industry Conference presentations, and others that contain a lot of information
2. Industry Publications
   1. There are likely already organizations keeping the pulse on your industry. These companies usually produce monthly newsletters / state of the industry reports, which you can have sent to your inbox. In addition, they often have an archive of relevant articles
3. Subscriptions
   1. There are aggregating sites such as Sentieo (my preferred) and FactSet
   1. There are industry-specific sites like Forecast International for A&D
   1. There are function-specific sites like MergerMarket for M&A
4. Internet Search
   1. Using Boolean searches to find news on companies / industries / end markets can help uncover a lot of good information. You can bookmark sites and opt-in to news feeds if you find a particularly useful site
5. Synthesize the Information
   1. Most importantly, learn to aggregate all of this data in the context of – and in concert with – your core strengths, strategic fit, the market characteristics, and the future of the industry

FINAL THOUGHTS

While the theme has been, more or less, why strategy and competitive intelligence are essential right now, I hope that the above has illustrated the importance of the function in both good times and bad.

As we head into the next earnings season, it is absolutely key to understand the industry and macro events, how they’ve shaped the current environment (and how things tracked against expectations), and what kind of climate companies see going forward.

A well-informed strategy, developed in cooperation with / full support of Operations and other key stakeholders, can allow a company to take advantage of opportunities and capture market share… even during a pandemic.

Want to learn more? Join our webinar “Planning Through Uncertainty: Are You Flying Half Blind?” featuring Jason on Wednesday, August 12 at 12PM ET / 9AM PT. Register here.

The post Planning Through Uncertainty: Are You Flying Half Blind? appeared first on Sentieo.

Over the last week, we looked at a logistics company, UPS (NYSE: UPS), a healthcare testing provider, LabCorp (NYSE: LH), and the regional theme park operator Six Flags Entertainment (NYSE: SIX). Today we will focus on The Clorox Company (NYSE: CLX).

The Clorox transcript Smart Summary we are reviewing today landed in our inboxes shortly after the call ended on May 01, 2020. 

The Smart Summary begins with a word cloud using NLP keyword surfacing on top of the new tear sheet.

As with the other companies we’ve covered over the last week, Covid is large. Unsurprisingly, the big standout is their Disinfecting Products business which was also picked up by our top keywords chart. Their trash bag (Glad brand) and grilling business have been positively affected by so many people staying at home. 

Unlike the other companies that we’ve looked at in this series, sentiment on the Clorox call was very positive versus prior calls.

The ML-based Category Heatmap is also more positive versus what we’ve seen with the other companies we’ve featured. As one would expect given the strong performance, the Business category (which encompasses sub-categories like revenue and volume) is “greener” than before.

The top terms have changed quite a bit versus prior calls: Covid is there (as it is with the other companies), but disinfecting products, volume growth, and healthcare facilities appear for the first time. Their cosmetics business, Burt’s, is no longer a top key term. 

In the next section, we highlight several categories from the ML output, along with their sentiment scoring. The first category is Covid: all mentions are negative. 

The top callouts in the Business section are all positive: we highlight long-term tailwinds, double-digit growth, and similar highly-positive sentences. 

In the 15-minute video below, we provide a more detailed walkthrough of the emailed Smart Summary along with the full version inside our product. We discuss in greater detail the machine learning sentence classification (we focus on volume and capacity expansion), and we look at the key terms. We take a peek at the product portfolio from a recent investor presentation. In our Equity Data Terminal, we highlight recent estimate revision trends along with the unusually wide range of estimates for the latest results, both for revenue and EPS. Finally, we discuss the outstanding relative performance of CLX against its S&P 500 Consumer Staples peers (the XLP ETF) and the broad S&P 500 index. 

Register here for our Q1 2020 Earnings Season Recap webinar on Thursday, May 7.

If you would like to learn more about Sentieo’s ML and NLP capabilities, we’d be happy to schedule a demo.

The post The Clorox Company (NYSE: CLX): A Rare Covid Winner Sees Double-digit Sales Growth and Capacity Expansion appeared first on Sentieo.

The LabCorp transcript we’re reviewing today was reported on April 29, 2020. As you can see below, the Smart Summary email came just a few minutes after the “old way” transcript (don’t worry, we have the full transcript in the Smart Summary too, with our NLP sentiment scoring applied).

The Smart Summary begins with a word cloud using NLP keyword surfacing on top of the new tearsheet. 

From the word cloud, we can quickly see that COVID-19 dominated the conversation, as is the case with the vast majority of the transcripts in Q1 2020. Serology is also related to COVID. We can also quickly spot Negative Impact, Adjusted Operating Income, and Drug Development—the company has some headwinds from trial delays. 

Overall sentiment is lower than prior quarters, but not like what we saw with UPS’s decidedly negative sentiment yesterday.

The ML-based Categories Heatmap is also more red than recent quarters across our broad ML classification categories. The increase in Deflection points to increased uncertainty versus the prior baseline. 

The top keywords, along with the top keywords over the last two years, are next in the emailed summary. We can see coronavirus and related terms (PCR and serology) dominate the call, along with “Negative Impact” and “Drug Development”. 

In the next section, we highlight several categories from the ML output, along with their sentiment scoring. The first category is Covid. 

In the top five Covid comments, we see the guidance withdrawal repeat (the company withdrew guidance in February) along with the client drug development program postponements. 

Business drivers are a mix of positive (i.e. share gains) and negative statements.

In the 10-min video below, we provide a more detailed walkthrough of the emailed Smart Summary along with the full version of the Smart Summary in the Sentieo platform, and check some of the data against the Smart Summary of LabCorp’s direct competitor, Quest (DGX).

Stay tuned for more highlights over the next week. You can register for our Q1 2020 Earnings Season Recap webinar on Thursday, May 7. And, if you would like to learn more about Sentieo’s ML and NLP capabilities, we’d be happy to schedule a demo. 

The post LabCorp (NYSE: LH) Transcript Smart Summary Highlight: Delays in Trials and 50% Volume Drop Counter COVID-19 Testing Capacity Ramp appeared first on Sentieo.

For the next few days, we will review Q1 calls across a variety of industries using our machine learning and natural language call transcript application, Smart Summary^TM. Today we will focus on UPS.

We released the first version of Smart Summary last July to rave reviews. This was followed up by an in-depth expansion of many of the machine learning classifications and improved visuals (word clouds, heat maps, and keyword extraction) in our March 2020 Sentieo 4.1 product release. 

Smart Summary fundamentally changes the way our clients read transcripts. While it’s important to listen to high priority calls live, Smart Summary ensures that you do not miss anything in your high priority list, whether you listen live, or not. Further, with Smart Summary you no longer need to read transcripts from your broader coverage universe chronologically. 

Today we will look at the most recent UPS transcript (Q1 2020 was reported on April 28, 2020). We can see that the Smart Summary email came in shortly after the “old way” transcript (don’t worry, we have the full transcript in the Smart Summary too, with our NLP sentiment scoring applied).

The Smart Summary PDF starts off with the word cloud through NLP keyword surfacing on top of the new tearsheet. 

We can see that Covid-related terms are prominently featured, as is Asia (recovering!), recession, and healthcare (big increase in mentions there due to a number of corporate initiatives). We can also see Headwinds and B2C: this immediately alerts us to the product mix headwinds that the company is experiencing (shift to the less profitable B2C). 

The overall sentiment of the call was decidedly negative versus prior quarters. 

We can also see this reflected in the darker color in the ML-based Categories Heatmap. Notice the particularly negative change in the Economic category, as well as the Deflection category, indicating considerable uncertainty. 

The top keywords in the transcript (along with the top keywords in the prior two years) are next: these mirror the word cloud. We can see the mix mentioned above (SMB and B2C), we can see Healthcare, Asia, and of course, Covid.

In the next section, we highlight several categories from the ML output, along with their sentiment scoring. The top category is Covid. In the top five Covid comments, we can immediately see the guidance withdrawal and the unfavorable mix shift language.

In the next category, Business, we see a mix of positive and negative in the top five. While ROIC and the initiatives are positive, we see the decline in U.S. operating income and mix shift (again!) as negatives. 

In the video below, we do a more detailed walkthrough of the emailed Smart Summary along with the full version inside our product.

Stay tuned for more highlights over the next week, and register below for our Q1 2020 Earnings Season Recap webinar on Thursday, May 7.

If you would like to learn more about Sentieo’s ML and NLP capabilities, please get in touch. 

The post UPS: Negative NLP Sentiment, ML Highlights Unfavorable Mix Amid the Covid Crisis; China Growing in March appeared first on Sentieo.

A number of these stocks were down in the double-digits only a day after we told the WSJ yesterday that the industry needed to take steps to “prevent shareholders from getting burned.” Incidentally, we also covered stress testing restaurant sales declines by looking at 2008-2009 filings, and modeling scenarios for ARMK in our online model during the webinar we did on Monday. 

We are seeing double-digit declines (vs. the 4-5% declines in US large caps and around 7% in US small caps), with names like DRI, JACK, TXRH, CBRL, BLMN CAKE, SHAK, EAT, DIN, DENN, BJRI, TAST, NDLS all down 10-20%, and PLAY, RRGB and ARCO (MCD franchisee) down more than 20%. We are also seeing yesterday’s highlights, ARMK (dining services) and SYY (restaurant distributor), down in the double digits as well. Delivery play GRUB is also down in the double digits.

Why? We see three reasons:

• First, restaurants, like the hard-hit travel industry, are consumer discretionary stocks. They compete with food at home, and the upcoming likely movement restrictions mean not reduced business, but zero business.
• Second, restaurants are broadly low margin businesses so small drops in revenue hurt the bottom line disproportionately.
• Finally, even if locations stay open, supply chain disruptions mean that the inventory will run out in a very short time, which means no sales.

Concerns over inventory

For example, below, we can see that CMG carries only two days worth of inventory. 

The market is also concerned about high-profile negative developments, such as BA pulling down a credit line (and the immediate CDS blowout) and Deutsche Bank “delaying” a payment on its CoCos. 

Drug trials driving headlines

On the positive side, we are seeing more news around GILD’s Remdesivir trials. We are staying on top of the topic with our Saved Search alerts. There are several other critical drug developments right now that can help the world recover. 

Guidance withdrawals continue

We continue to see an uptick in 2020 guidance withdrawals from the travel/hospitality industry. The quotes in the press releases point to what we would call a sudden stop.

RLJ Lodging Trust (RLJ)

Xenia Hotels & Results, Inc. (XHR)

Hilton Worldwide Holdings, Inc. (HLT)

The post Restaurant Stocks Implosion Marks a Difficult Day in the Markets DRI JACK CAKE ARCO PLAY GRUB appeared first on Sentieo.

University campus closures are affecting stocks as high-profile schools move to online instruction (we covered the early move to “work from home” stocks on our blog a few weeks ago). Today we saw the market being somewhat slow to react to these announcements: for example, Tuesday morning the Harvard Crimson tweeted that students were required to move out of the dorms no later than March 15th. 

College housing pure-play American Campus Communities (ACC) opened at $42.77 and proceeded to drop 10% over the next few hours as more announcements started rolling in. We saw a similar pattern with Aramark (exposure to university dining/events/sports): the stock had about a 6% intra-day drop. Coincidentally, we did stress-test Aramark using our online model vs. current consensus during our webinar on Monday. Food distributor Sysco had a 5% drop. 

Quickly gauging exposures across corporations

Using advanced search tools such as in-10K, in-Risk Factors, and in-table searches for quantification can help you quickly gauge exposures. For example, we can see that Sysco’s education business (which includes K-12 and higher ed) is around 9% of revenues.

On the Risk Factor side, here is APTS (ACC’s Risk Factors also get picked up)

One “campus” stock that seems unaffected so far is BNED

The seasonality in the college bookstore operator has been favorable in this case, as we can see in the visualization of quarterly revenues and EBIT below (from our data visualization tool Plotter)

Elsewhere in coronavirus comments

We continue to see travel-related companies pulling guidance (as we spotted on Monday afternoon, and shared with you on Tuesday morning). For example, we saw Delta Airlines, Jet Blue and Royal Caribbean pulling their 2020 numbers. This will be a recurring theme as uncertainty increases by the hour. 

Given the ubiquity of the outbreak, we are noticing an increase in coronavirus-related discussions without mentions of the virus (or synonyms, like COVID) as the problems discussed are widely understood to relate to the outbreak. Here are two supply chain-related comments from the Barclays Healthcare Conference (held virtually this year). 

Transcripts (monthly doc count) with “quarantine”

We saw a lot of mentions of Italy/Milan/Lombardy in transcripts during the day across industries. We are also seeing the MTD transcript count with mentions of “quarantine” move upwards, now at 50 in ten days. Some green shoots though: QRTEA (Retail) and ALB (Lithium) noted normalization in China. 

Transcripts (monthly doc count) with Italy/Milan/Lombardy

Comments on China normalization from Albemarle

Comments on China normalization from Qurate Retail (parent of QVC, HSN, Zuilily and other ecomm brands)

I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. And make sure you register for Friday’s webinar for more analysis and live Q&A. 

If you would like to receive these posts as a daily email update, please sign up below:

The post University campus closures affecting ACC ARMK SYY appeared first on Sentieo.

We are seeing a spike in guidance withdrawals due to COVID-19. Currently, the affected companies are concentrated in the travel sector but we expect this to become very widespread. We have extracted a few highlights below, including Booking and Vail Resorts. 

We continue to see extensive discussions around inventory, supply chain and other topics in transcripts. We have been helping clients get creative with the queries to ensure that all potential red flags everywhere are spotted. 

For the highlights at the bottom, we are searching transcripts for: (outbreak OR virus OR COVID OR Wuhan OR China OR Hebei) NEAR15 (supply OR closure OR inventory OR delay OR postpone)

Note that our synonym search will stem your queries, and will pick up terms like coronavirus because you have entered COVID. 

We are sharing comments from Ascena Retail Group (while production has been moving out of China but accessories are still a problem), Purple Innovation (some considerations around parts), U.S. Auto Parts Network (generally in good shape though the implications are that other parts suppliers might have greater exposures), and Clarus Corporation (they are seeing supply in China coming back online). 

If you have any questions, are struggling to keep up with the deluge of information, let alone visualize trends and think through the implications, please do get in touch with us.

The post Selected coronavirus comments + 2020 guidance withdrawals BKNG MTN HST PEB RHP SOHO appeared first on Sentieo.

As the pandemic situation unfolds exponentially, we started looking at what the CEOs specifically are saying in transcripts by using our popular in-transcript, said-by-the-CEO search and ML-based keyword suggestions. 

Perhaps the most consequential word is deceleration (and related stemming, like decelerate or decelerated). 

We are seeing mentions globally and across industries: here is the CEO of beer giant AB InBev on February 27th. 

Black Swan is also making an appearance: the concept of an unexpected but highly consequential event was popularized by former options trader and current philosopher-flaneur Nassim Taleb in his eponymous book. We can clearly see that February 2020 was a standout month for CEOs talking about black swans during investor calls. 

And, like deceleration above, it is global: from a Russian gold and silver miner to a US potash producer to Chinese ecomm giant Alibaba. 

We are also seeing a major increase in transcripts where the CEOs talk about “supply chain” (exact match): February 2020 was a standout month, again, with over 800 transcripts. We can also see the existing trend in general as the trade wars were heating up but now supply chain is a front and center issue, discussed directly by the CEOs. 

February 2020 transcripts also saw a spike in CEOs talking about postponing things. This is extremely concerning as CEOs collectively exercise control over trillions of dollars in aggregate project spending globally. We searched for postpone (with our automatic stemming, like postponed or postponement). 

Once again, we are seeing a wide variety of industries and geographies. Just in the last few days, here is the CEO of Hugo Boss AG (apparel)

Geox SpA (footwear)

JCDeaux SA (global advertising)

Based on the linguistic trends of CEO language, we see a very large potential for a significant corporate-driven pullback in spending leading to a global recession. The volatility in the equity and fixed income markets, along with the widening of the credit spreads support this outlook as well. Below, we can see the VIX and 10-yr treasury vol at 2011 levels, with the CCC OAS spreads widening. 

If you are struggling to keep up with the deluge of information, let alone visualize trends and think through the implications, please do get in touch with us. 

The post Coronavirus impact: CEOs are seeing black swans and deceleration appeared first on Sentieo.

Whether you are an investment analyst, investor relations officer, or other financial and corporate research professional, automating your earnings season research process with an alert-driven, AI-powered workflow can save you a significant amount of time and ensure no material insights are missed.

We’ve put together a series of short videos to show you how Sentieo can be used to:

• Set up a watchlist (or watchlists) of companies
• Schedule email (“push”) alerts to be sent to you when new documents are available for companies on your watchlist
• Manage the full research workflow from alerts through to highlighting filings and capturing them in a research note to share with your team
• Stay on top of topics (not just specific company tickers) through saved search alerts
• Create dashboards to get an at-a-glance view into all of the information you are tracking for watchlists or individual companies

In this first video, we discuss why you need watchlists for your alerts. While you can configure individual alerts by company, having a watchlist lets you do several things on the Sentieo platform. One is set up the same alerts for the whole list at once. Another is searching all the documents for that watchlist at once in our document search. You can also bring up the watchlists in any dashboards that you build in Sentieo. 

For example, if you take the US automotive industry, maybe you want to track the parts suppliers, the manufacturers, and the car dealers separately. Having three watchlists lets you monitor the entire chain with the level of detail that you need. Maybe you don’t want all Form 4s from the parts suppliers but you want absolutely everything that comes from one or more car dealers. 

In this video, we go over what your watchlist-based alerts look like in your email inbox. You can choose to have the alerts come to you via email, on the desktop app, or on the mobile app. The starting point is the watchlist with the asset managers that we showed in the first video in the series. The key here is the high level of customization of the email alerts you receive: control content and control timing. Most documents are also delivered in full in your inbox: no need to click several times on the company websites to read them. 

In the videos above, we cover the purpose of watchlists and alerts, and what these alerts look like for one specific watchlist in your email inbox or a special email folder. In this video we will focus on workflow: we will show what to do from here with your alerts. We look at our machine learning and natural language processing transcript Smart Summary. We also show a workflow that incorporates your highlights from transcripts, filings, and PowerPoints into one research report that is sent out to your team.

In this video, we will focus on staying on top of topics through saved search alerts. Sentieo’s machine learning-powered document search solution doesn’t require you to search specific tickers. We help you find the needle in the haystack and automate the monitoring of these topics. Any search can be saved, including mentions of a company while excluding that company’s documents (to remove false positives), searches across different filters, like industry or “in table” or for specific regulatory forms. 

In this video, we cover using Sentieo’s customizable dashboards to get the information you need as it becomes available. Unlike alerts that come to your email or desktop or mobile, dashboards let you look at new information “at a glance”. We set up a simple dashboard for a variety of documents, curated tweets, saved searches, stock price information, and news. Be sure to read our recent blog post for more detailed information and videos on Sentieo’s updated Dashboard functions. 

Ready to win your earnings season with an alert-driven, AI-powered workflow? Get in touch with us today to learn more.

The post Win Earnings Season with an Alert-Driven, AI-Powered Workflow appeared first on Sentieo.

All indications point to the 2019 holiday shopping season remaining very strong, with 3.8%-4.2% spending growth expected. Online spending on Thanksgiving Day itself was up almost 15% to a new record high. Adobe’s shopping tracker reported $7.4 bn in online spending on Black Friday, up almost 20% YoY, and another $3.6 bn Cyber Monday, up 18% YoY. 

5 Holiday Winners

1. Peloton

Maybe you’ve seen The Ad, and maybe you’ve read about the controversy. Perhaps you liked the ad, or perhaps you did not. But what really matters here is that Peloton, a relative newcomer to the public markets, was able to dominate the conversation for a few days (!) and insert its $2,000 stationary bike + $39/mo sub plan as a possible holiday gift for many consumers this year. Step aside, Lexus! 

Interactive public chart viewer 

2. Roku:

We really liked Roku in early 2019 when we released our Sentieo 11 alternative data stock picks: it was the top performing pick in H1. We also included it in our July 13 picks for H2 2019. We discuss the idea in detail, as well as the overall alternative data methodology used, in this webinar from July with our CEO/co-founder Alap Shah and VP of Product Arib Rahman. 

Our alternative data composite index (a multivariate regression for the most predictive basket weights of the available data sets) is pointing to an exceptionally strong holiday season for Roku. We would not be surprised to see a revenue beat (street estimates of quarterly revenue are the dotted green line in the chart; actuals are the solid green line). 

Interactive public chart viewer 

3. Airpods: 

Airpods are… seasonal? 

The bluetooth audio/mic earbuds by Apple are hot this season much to our surprise. (Did everyone lose theirs at the same time, or are they now a discretionary accessory?) We can’t be sure, other than what we see in the data: highest ever search interest and seasonal high Twitter mentions (30-day moving average) for the product (starting at $159 in the US for the basic version).

Interactive public chart viewer 

4. Rosetta Stone:

Rosetta Stone is a language learning software company that has had its ups and downs over the last few years. We spotted the alternative data index acceleration in our Screener, and we were immediately interested. 

Interactive public chart viewer

The acceleration is due to web traffic: we are seeing a 100%+ spike on a year-over-year basis on rolling 30- and 91-day moving average basis. 

Interactive public chart viewer  

5. Five Below:

The discount retailer was also another one of our H1 picks, like Roku and Nintendo above. They reported strong results on December 4th (retailer fiscal years are generally on a January year-end so their earnings season is later than most: see our Q3 machine learning/NLP Transcript Smart Summaries here on real Q3 calls from Facebook, YUM! Brands, Beyond Meat and Merck). We see strong data sets for Five into the holiday season (yet to be reported). 

“Stacked” search trends show annual search trends for the entire year, “stacked” on top of prior years. We see that 2019 has been very good for Five Below, including the current holiday season. 

We are also seeing good web traffic. 

Interactive public chart viewer 

The momentum has meant a great looking Sentieo alternative data composite index for the FIVE revenue growth for the quarter that was just reported, and likely continued strong performance through the holiday season. 

Interactive public chart viewer 

1 Holiday Loser: Victoria’s Secret 

Our pick for the loser this holiday season is Victoria’s Secret, a unit of L Brands. The lingerie brand has seen years of declining search interest and weak comparable store sales, as shown in the table below, which uses our one-click table chaining and extraction tool.

We are seeing very weak search trends compared with the last 10 years!

Note that VS is one of two brands for the parent company, L brands. The other one, Bath and Body Works, has been strong over the last few years. 

To try analyzing alternative datasets for yourself, try Sentieo today.

The post Who Won Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Sentieo Uncovers 5 Winners and 1 Loser appeared first on Sentieo.

About the Customer

LockerDome (“an ad platform with a brain”) is a software designed specifically for performance-based advertising. LockerDome, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, is trusted by leading advertisers and publishers to drive revenue. Advertisers trust LockerDome’s ad platform to generate revenue from product sales, and publishers trust LockerDome to maximize revenue from their website, in-app, and email traffic.

Mark Lewis, CFO, is LockerDome’s head of finance and accounting. Mark also oversees competitive intelligence (CI) analysis for the company.

Challenge/Problem

LockerDome competes with public adtech companies such as Critteo, The Trade Desk, and Rubicon. As the CFO, Mark manages all of LockerDome’s admin, accounting, legal, and HR teams. This makes for a lot of responsibilities and limited time for CI research, especially at a rapidly growing, lean tech company.

Before using Sentieo, Mark was investing far too many hours searching through documents and manually tracking competitor activity. He was using Excel or Google spreadsheets to track comparable company metrics: funds raised, valuations (at private round, IPO, current, exit), revenue, net income, EBITDA, valuation multiples, acquisitions, board seats, and more.

Mark was spending hours on gathering, tracking, and updating these metrics — all manually. Unfortunately, this made it easy for him to miss insights and difficult for him to maintain updates and scale his work. He was also dealing with many different sources of information that he was unable to easily access.

All of these issues led him to try Sentieo.

Solution and Results

In 2018, Mark invested in Sentieo as his principle corporate research platform in order to accelerate his research process. The goals of this investment were to:

• Dramatically decrease the time he and his team spent
researching competitor news and public filings
• Reduce the risk of LockerDome missing a change in strategy
by a competitor that would have impacted their business
• Get visibility into competitor insights to drive the process of
adapting and growing their corporate strategy

Want to see how Sentieo solved LockerDome’s pain points? Read the full story here.

The post LockerDome Cuts CI Research Time In Half With Sentieo appeared first on Sentieo.