Today we are recapping highlights of a discussion between Chris Terry, Vice President, Portfolio Manager, and Senior Research Analyst at Dallas-based RIA, Hodges Capital Management, and Nick Mazing, Head of Research at Sentieo.

Nick:

Can you tell us about your background and the focus of Hodges Capital Management?

Chris:

I am a portfolio manager, analyst, and serve on our investment team here at Hodges Capital. I’ve been doing this for about 20 years.

Our firm has been around for over 30 years. We’re an investment advisor, based in Dallas, Texas, serving endowments, high net worth individuals, family offices, and we also manage a family of mutual funds. We have approximately $800 million in assets under management, split evenly between the mutual funds and the separate accounts. We are primarily focused on small cap stocks and are fundamentally driven. We like earnings and cash flow, and try to find hidden gems, under-covered opportunities.

Nick:

Can you describe your investment process and tell us how the Sentieo platform fits into that process?

Chris:

Because we are fundamentally driven, we like to get in and really understand the company, business model, and talk to management teams. Our analysts, including myself, within the investment team gather, process, then distribute information, which we now do on the Sentieo platform.

Two or three years ago, we would have used four or five different types of technology to manage this process. For example, when I first started in the business, I was taking hand notes and would put those notes in a file cabinet and keep them there for several years. Then we transitioned over to using Microsoft Word and Excel, and keeping and distributing notes internally using Outlook. Over the years, we’ve tried other services and tools, like Evernote, to improve the research workflow.

Sentieo gives us everything we need in one platform and has become a focal point for our research efforts. And it’s not just a workflow solution for managing due diligence. We also pull and aggregate data in the platform, for example using Sentieo’s smart search to find information, grab financials and key ratios, and so much more.

Sentieo is literally the first thing that I log on to every morning to get an update on any news or press releases, brokerage research, transcripts, and filings.

Nick:

When we think about research management systems, we see people using things like Google Drive,  consumer-grade applications, even control F for search, which seems stone-age now. The first thing I think about with an RMS is it has to be easy to use at every level. Easy to search and find things. Easy to monitor if you’re at the PM or compliance level, and to keep everybody on the same page, anywhere, whether it’s mobile, working from home or from the office. And, of course, you want to protect your intellectual property—theses, knowledge, research, and interviews, and other due diligence—and easily manage coverage hand-off.

So, prior to Sentieo, it sounds like analysts at Hodges were mostly using copy and paste, inserting links into Word documents or Evernote, is this that correct?

Chris:

Yes, we were using a couple of different providers. For drafting notes, we started with Microsoft Office and Word, then we tried Evernote for a little while, but obviously this tool had shortcomings on the financial side. We didn’t have one cohesive place for all of our information. The real problem was if I wanted news from an analyst or wanted to see a research report, I would have to log on to our internal server to pull that data off of our network, or go search through thousands of emails to find that one note or piece of research, or I may have to go to Evernote or other sources.

It was a real issue finding the research that we had, all within our own building. And we’ve got a firm of 25 people and we’re all in one location. It was really inefficient the way that we were distributing our research prior to Sentieo

Nick:

What happened to your old notes, the ones that were created prior to Sentieo?

Chris:

We were able to upload all of our old notes into Sentieo pretty seamlessly so we now have everything in one place.

Nick:

Did you start using templates in Sentieo for capturing notes from management meetings, earnings reports, expert network calls, or due diligence visits?

Chris:

It is challenging for us to create a template on a general note because each of our analysts have their own different writing style. I prefer to use bullet points while other analysts like to write out full sentences. While we don’t have a template yet on notes, the information we capture is the same across the team, we just may present it differently.

Nick:

What about full blown thesis sheets? Are you using those in Sentieo?

Chris:

Yes, we are actually using the default thesis sheet template that comes with Sentieo, including the price target.

One of the not so obvious ways the thesis templates have really helped us out is in our role as a mutual fund manager. We have a custodian bank and are subject to annual audits. As part of that process, they always want to make sure that we’re doing the appropriate due diligence for the stocks that we’re investing in, and the thesis sheets are key to this process.

Prior to Sentieo, the auditor would come in and ask for our research on a list of companies, and we’d have to pull all the research from multiple different sources. In Sentieo, we can literally type in a ticker symbol and it shows all of our workflow, the due diligence, and most importantly, the thesis on why we bought or sold the stock. Sentieo has been tremendously beneficial from a compliance perspective.

Nick:

Do you currently use dashboards in Sentieo? Do you have multiple dashboards or do you have one dashboard where you have everything?

Chris:

I currently run three dashboards, one on my watch list, where I think I’ve got eight or nine widgets, mostly news flow, company news, press releases, transcripts, filings, broker research, my calendar, and notes. And then I’ve got a separate watch list for an individual ticker, where I’ve got historical margins, the thesis, and a couple other widgets. And then I’ve also got a valuation watch board as well, with a handful of widgets showing different multiples in chart form, spanning anywhere from 5 to 10 years so I can see what’s going on with the devaluation across that timeframe.

Nick:

Do you have any closing remarks for us Chris?

Chris:

I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about Sentieo—it’s such a robust system and I feel like we’re really just scratching the surface on its capabilities. Sentieo has been a game changer for us in our process and for our research team. It’s been great to hold each of our analysts accountable, which is yet another benefit of the Sentieo platform.

To learn more, listen to the full conversation which took place during our recent webinar, RMS Best Practices: Thriving in the Post-COVID Environment, and read our Hodges Capital Case Study.

The post RMS Best Practices: Interview with Hodges Capital Management 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.

Challenge

The desire for a more powerful document search and the need for document tagging and annotation abilities were the primary reasons that the RGA team wanted to switch to Sentieo.

Prior to Sentieo, they were using Bloomberg. They have since removed a Bloomberg license, as Sentieo has rendered it redundant.

“Nothing else on the market came close to offering us a streamlined and collaborative platform for reviewing and annotating company documents and transcripts. We were intrigued by Sentieo’s impressive capability to pull as-reported data into Excel. A web-native, cloud platform was a big plus.” – Jason Gilbert, RGA Investment Advisors

Solution and Results

Jason’s partner Elliot found Sentieo through recommendations from like-minded investors discussing investments on Twitter. Sentieo’s powerful document search functionality was particularly appealing, along with the Sentieo Notebook highlighting and note-taking capabilities.

A Typical ‘Day In the Life’ with Sentieo

Jason wakes up around 5:30 am and starts the day reading through a vast array of morning digest emails and the WSJ via his iPad. Afterward, he logs into Sentieo to check his followed tickers and peruse any news that he may have missed. During earnings season, he’ll generally spend more time in Sentieo Document Search looking through earnings transcripts. If he sees that Elliot has already annotated a given transcript, he’ll generally access it through the Sentieo Notebook and use Elliot’s highlights as a guide.

For Elliot, no two days are alike, but he almost always starts by catching up on news in the morning:

“I have Sentieo email alerts setup for every stock in our portfolio and for our primary watchlist…That gives me something to look through every day before moving onto my primary research objectives.”

When screening for ideas or after being recently introduced to a stock, Elliot reads the most recent filings and 10-K, highlighting and annotating along the way. He runs document searches for key terms of interest and gathers some historical context. When building models, he uses Sentieo to extract tables directly from the 10-Q and 10-Ks. Like Jason’s, a good chunk of Elliot’s day is spent reading and marking up transcripts in Sentieo during earnings season and conference season. Jason and Elliot find themselves using Sentieo’s Document Search, Notebook, Watchlists, Alerts, and Equity Data Terminal the most frequently throughout their workdays.

Document Search and Excel Modeling

Elliot’s favorite feature is Document Search because it’s “so simple and easy to use and invaluable in numerous contexts.” Document Search and the Notebook are “without a doubt” Jason’s favorite features. They both run keyword searches multiple times a day.

Watchlists, Alerts, and Redlining

Elliot’s favorite feature is Document Search because it’s “so simple and easy to use and invaluable in numerous contexts.” Document Search and the Notebook are “without a doubt” Jason’s favorite features.

They both run keyword searches multiple times a day.

The team uses watchlists to track the companies tickers that interest them, opting into “crucial” email alerts for new documents and price news. They also heavily use Sentieo’s redlining comparison tool regularly during big filing seasons, and especially on 10-K’s.

The Notebook (Research Management System)

Jason and Elliot use the team note-sharing and collaboration features within the Notebook to share ideas and keep each other up-to-date. Elliot’s second favorite Sentieo feature is highlighting because “it’s fantastic to have all my markings stored in one place, neatly.” They both use document highlighting and annotation tools multiple times a day.

Equity Data Terminal

“It’s amazing how much cleaner this data is presented in Sentieo versus in Bloomberg. It was easy to overcome my inertia here.” -Jason Gilbert, RGA Investment Advisors

Jason uses the Sentieo Equity Data Terminal multiple times a day to check company summary pages, which display everything from the company description to valuation and price targets, historical charts, estimates, and much more.

“My biggest time savings come from having neat sorting and access to information in the Sentieo equity data terminal, and from easy recall of key things that I may have noted through the Sentieo Notebook.” – Elliot Turner, RGA Investment Advisors

Mobile

Jason uses the iPhone app often, mainly for staying updated on his followed tickers.

Download this customer story as a PDF here.

The post RGA Investment Advisors Saves Hours with Sentieo’s Document Search and Research Management Features appeared first on Sentieo.

With a lean team and a rigorous research process, Chris Devlin, founder of Selective Wealth, wanted a solution that would save him time. He wanted to spend less time trying to find information, and more time analyzing his findings to create more alpha-generating ideas.

Before switching to an RMS, Chris saved notes in Word documents within ticker-labeled file folders on his desktop. This involved a lot of time spent copy-pasting and annotating outside of the original documents, and it was also challenging to keep track of different document types and ultimately build a thesis in a reasonable amount of time.

What Is an RMS?

An RMS — or research management system — helps investment professionals organize and optimize their research process with features like:

• document highlighting & annotation
• team collaboration on shared notes and documents
• auto-tagged notes, charts, and tables that are searchable by ticker or custom tags defined by you

An RMS Makes Idea Organization Easier in 3 Ways

Chris uses the Notebook, Sentieo’s integrated research management system, “from soup to nuts” in these key ways:

• His document highlights and annotations get auto-tagged to tickers so his team can stay organized
• He uses a custom thesis template to speed up and standardize thesis writing across the team
• He saves hours creating and sharing notes with his team inside the RMS, instead of using Word docs and emails.

The post How Selective Wealth Management Improved Productivity by 50% With An RMS appeared first on Sentieo.

Challenge

The Vision Research team needed a tool that would allow for thorough document research, but also allow them to quickly organize and communicate ideas across their remote team.

Solution and Results

One of Vision’s clients recommended Sentieo to Robert and his team, and they were immediately impressed with Sentieo’s Document Search, and especially Sentieo’s Notebook research management system.

Robert and his team members have been using various document search tools for over a decade, including Thomson Reuters StreetEvents and Alphasense. However, they now solely use Sentieo, which has powerful search functionality, but also integrates with the rest of their workflow very easily.

Document Search For Idea Generation and More

The Vision Research team uses Sentieo’s Document Search on a daily basis, for a couple of reasons:

• Idea generation – querying certain “buzzwords” or specific keywords and their synonyms (and eliminating false positives)

• Researching an idea that they have already begun, continuing to follow a story

Sentieo has been a timesaver in both of these tasks, allowing the team to experience 75% time savings when compared with previous platforms. The team especially likes the Document Search redlining tool, which allows them to compare language from the same document type from different quarters.

Tables, Export to Excel, and Modeling

One feature that the team was not able to find in Alphasense or other platforms was a table extraction tool that allowed them to extract tables from any document and push them into Excel. Sentieo allows them to do this and more, including the ability to extract and easily compare tables historically over quarters or years. With the Sentieo TableX suite, the team spends 50% less time than it used to on modeling activities.

The Notebook: Collaboration Made Easier

The Sentieo Notebook was the platform’s biggest selling point for the team. Before Sentieo, the team used a shared cloud drive to store files, and communicated information using only hundreds of emails and Excel spreadsheets, which ended up being a very inefficient process for them.

Now the team is able to create notes and categorize them for easy organization across the team. They have created a system where they can share ideas and label them “Reviewed” “Unreviewed,” and more. Everyone on the team can comment, and there is a trail of comments and activities that they can reference at any time.

This is especially helpful because the team works remotely across different offices in Dallas, and some members of the team travel frequently. The Notebook keeps their research all in one place, transparent across the team, and has made for at least 50% time savings compared to their old process.

Equity Data Terminal: Financial Data At Their Fingertips

The team started using Sentieo’s built-in equity data terminal because they ultimately wanted to replace Bloomberg, and did not want to have to buy expensive Bloomberg licenses for future junior employees joining the team. Sentieo offers all the quality financial data they need, from street estimates to trading multiples and shareholders data — at a fraction of the price of Bloomberg.

Mobile Apps For Researching Anywhere, Anytime

The team uses the Sentieo mobile app to get instant push notifications about tickers and companies that they are following.

The post Vision Research Achieves 75% Time Savings With Sentieo Collaboration Tools appeared first on Sentieo.

Memphis Research in Memphis, TN

Using Sentieo Since 2016

Memphis Research offers investment research, portfolio management, and consulting services for the hedge fund industry. Chad Gilliland (President) and Will Frazier (VP/Director) started the firm together in 2011 after working together at a hedge fund for some time.

The Challenge

Before Sentieo, the Memphis Research team had tried many financial research platforms, including Capital IQ and Bloomberg. All had fallen short of their expectations in a number of ways. They had un-intuitive user interfaces, limited mobile access, and were overpriced — to name a few shortcomings.

The Solution and Results

The team came across Sentieo and started a free trial. They immediately saw their fundamental research process improve:

“We feel like the Sentieo team understands what we do better than other platforms do. You are analysts and you think the way that we do. You know how to design the interface, and what you put into the product is not just random. You’ve included the pertinent details that an investment analyst wants to see. It makes a huge difference that the platform is truly built for analysts, by analysts.”

Document Search, Redlining, Watchlist Alerts, and News Stream

The Memphis team likes to run very specific keyword searches using Sentieo’s Document Search. They are able to narrow their searches down by document type, down to the document section (ie. “Risk Factors”). One popular use case for them is searching for disingenuous language and other signifiers within call transcripts.

The team also uses the Document Search redlining tool, which allows them to hone in on new document language or accounting numbers that have changed across quarters or over years.

Will and Chad also “follow” tickers in Sentieo by creating Watchlists of the companies they want to track. This allows them to receive immediate updates to their email inbox whenever new filings or financial statements come out for those companies. This is especially helpful to them during earnings season, when time is of the essence.

The team also keeps up with companies using the Sentieo News Stream, which is a feed of the latest social media tweets and articles about the companies they track.

An Equity Data Terminal They Can Trust

Will spends most of his time in the Sentieo Equity Data Terminal. He really loves the EDT’s company summary page, which lists a company’s consensus estimates, valuation and price target, major holders, and much more:

“In the EDT, I can quickly understand the nuts and bolts of a company. I have more confidence doing my research in Sentieo because I trust the data more than I trust the numbers in other systems.”

Will also extracts tables from documents into Excel, and compares them over time using Sentieo’s TableX suite of tools.

Staying Organized With The Notebook

Chad uses the Notebook (Sentieo’s research management system) to store his own notes and annotations by ticker, and to search through them as needed.

Mobile App For Access Anywhere, Anytime

Chad and Will frequently travel to trade shows, and they use the Sentieo mobile and tablet apps to keep working on-the-go. With Sentieo, they are able to quickly pull up financials and estimates at their fingertips, instead of printing and taking physical 10Ks and 10Qs with them. When listening to management calls, they are able to quickly pull up the expectations for a ticker on their mobile, and compare them to what’s being discussed on the spot. Chad also heavily uses the Sentieo app for the iPad tablet.

Conclusion

Will and Chad explained that Sentieo has revolutionized their fundamental research flow and saved them all the time and frustration they felt when using previous tools:

“We definitely positively endorse Sentieo. It’s an intuitive platform for built for the fundamental equity analyst, and helps us filter out the noise and get down to the fundamentals.”

The post Memphis Research Finds A Financial Research Platform It Can Trust appeared first on Sentieo.