Following the recent Fitch reports integration in Sentieo’s award-winning Document Search module, we sat down with Justin Patrie, CFA, Senior Director, Fitch Ratings, to discuss Fitch’s H2 2022 outlook. 

In this webinar, Mr. Patrie covers both the deteriorating global macroeconomic conditions as well as shares insights from the changes in Fitch’s ratings across sectors and geographies. 

From the macroeconomic perspective, Mr. Patrie discusses what drove the downward revisions for GDP growth across regions in the first six months of 2022. Fitch has also substantially increased the full-cycle rates and inflation forecasts. Further, the downside case scenarios for H2 2022 have increased in probability: from stagflation (high inflation with low growth), to a global recession, to the unknown effects of monetary tightening after decades of declining rates. 

The specific sector outlooks have also been revised. While Fitch takes a “full cycle” view on ratings, extreme exogenous shocks do play a role in the revisions. While most sector outlooks remain neutral, the number of negative sector outlooks increased substantially following the detailed mid-year reviews, and the number of positive sector outlooks decreased. 

On the positive side:

Fitch sees improvements in commodities and certain services, driven, in part, by the still-strong labor markets. But the clouds are gathering for 2023, considering the ongoing tightening. 

Within the more vulnerable sectors, Mr. Patrie highlighted Emerging and Frontier Markets, Unsecured Lending, and Real Estate. 

For example, Eastern European commodity importers are increasingly vulnerable in 2022 due to the confluence of weaker currencies, strong commodities, and proximity to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Unsecured Lending, especially European Asset-Backed Securities, is exposed to declining real incomes and overall economic deceleration. The picture is similar with Real Estate broadly, with interesting sub-sector details shared during the webinar. The vulnerabilities there are driven by the YTD rate increases, especially in countries with issues on affordability and a high mix of floating-rate mortgages. 

During the Q-and-A session, we covered inflation trends including gas supply to the EU and soft commodities, specific sovereigns (including commodity exporters in the Gulf and Latin America), and sovereigns with higher USD external debt exposure. 

Watch the full webinar with Fitch Ratings and browse our other videos on our media channel.

The post Stagflation Risks and Credit Ratings: A Mid-Year Chat with Fitch Ratings (Webinar Recap) appeared first on Sentieo.

• Integration of Sustainalytics ESG rating reports (webinar and recap) 
• Integration of ClarityAI ESG ratings (announcement and dashboard) 
• Multiple informational webinars including Impact Investing (open access webinar), UN PRI Implementation for alternative asset managers (webinar), SEC ESG reporting requirements (webinar and recap), using Sentieo for ESG research (webinar), quantitative ESG metrics (webinar)
• Presentations at conferences such as Neudata’s ESG trends (recap)
• Integrating ESG for UN PRI compliance in your Research Management System (guide)
• Multiple pre-built Dashboards for clients including Sustainalytics Dashboard and ESG Topic Monitoring Dashboard, as well as short videos such as Advanced ESG searches utilizing our ESG synonyms   
• ESG white papers/ESG trend books such as 33 Accelerating ESG Trends in Corporate Transcripts 

ESG data generated from the Sentieo platform has been quoted extensively in the media, including: 

• US companies add environmental and social targets to executive bonuses (Financial Times) 
• ESG Metrics Help CFOs Attract New Investors, Reduce Costs (Wall Street Journal)

In our latest Dashboard release, we have focused on ESG controversy monitoring, harnessing the extensive news sources integration, combined with Sentieo’s award-winning AI search, to bring clients a single dashboard that monitors twenty-one different ESG controversies, including:

• Embargoes and sanctions
• Incidents, fires and spills
• Corruption and bribery 
• Monetary fines and settlements
• Tax fraud and tax evasion 
• Product recalls 
• Collusion and antitrust issues 
• Deforestation and soil erosion 
• Animal testing
• Privacy violations 
• And much more, including both established and emerging ESG controversies  

The ESG Controversy Monitoring Dashboard is ready and available for all Sentieo clients and trial users who have the premium news package on the platform. In the three-minute video above, we go over the Dashboard itself, as well as how users can further customize it for their specific needs in seconds. 

The post Monitoring ESG Controversies in a Sentieo Dashboard appeared first on Sentieo.

1. Three levels of synonyms

• Synonyms/acronyms ON  

• OFF but keep stemming (i.e. gerunds, possessives, plurals) 

• “Exact match” 

You would have missed 36 out of 44 relevant results on the most recent DAL call with Ctrl-F!

2. Read multiple documents on one screen with Snippets view.

3. Search for number types, like currency, percentage, volume, or dosage, with or without keywords.

4. Control the distance between your query words: keep them as close or as far as needed.

5. Save your searches and have them come to you as alerts, or on your Dashboards.

6. Compare what management or members of management are saying, versus what the analysis are asking about with Speaker Search.

7. Sort by Relevance or by Hits for recent, but higher “density”, documents.

8. Add multiple document types in the query box with the IN: shortcut as you go.

9. Search titles across corporate, research, regulatory, and news documents for specific issues of importance.

10. Combine multiple tickers and watchlists for your searches: here we are picking up news and filings for our US Airlines watchlist members.

11. You don’t even have to search: enter a ticker and go to that company’s Documents Homepage, where all important corporate documents are lined up, while all recent news, research reports, and more are on the left. 

12. Do you have internal content? Make it searchable, too, with our integrations with many popular internal doc tools, or through direct manual or automatic uploads.

13. Use ! to exclude a company from the results. For example, !AAPL !MSFT will exclude AAPL and MSFT documents. Use it to gauge product adoption by other companies! 

14. Like a section or a document? Highlight with a topic, or bookmark, write a comment, tag a coworker!  It is all saved and searchable in our integrated Research Management System.

15. Searchable investor presentations? Of course! Select Presentations or just use the IN:PPT shortcut.
Here we are searching MDLZ for Oreo.

16. Search sell side reports by bank: select specific banks, or use IN:RR: for a list of banks in the shortcuts, like IN:RR:GS for reports from GS or IN:RR:MS for reports from MS.

To learn more about how you can do this in our platform, and liberate yourself from CTRL-F watch our basic and advanced Document Search webinars. You can also check out our full video library.

The post 16 Tips on How to Search Better with Sentieo’s award-winning AI-Powered Search! appeared first on Sentieo.

1. Call audio with controls like 2x, fast forward, and more

2. NLP word clouds: See the major topics at a glance

3. NLP transcript heatmaps: See sentiment and snippets by topic

4. NLP trending topics: See accelerating topics by company and by sector, and click to read these specific segments

5. Transcript sentiment toggle: See positive and negative sentences as you read

6. Transcript navigation by topic: Focus on important issues regardless of where they are on the call

7. Manage the transcripts “firehose”: See all transcripts coming in, or filter by region, market cap, sector, and more

8. Earnings Calendar widget shows a monthly view of upcoming reporting dates

9. For in-depth earnings prep, our ‘Earnings Portal’ is great to see estimated trends, prior reactions, and a lot more

To learn more about how we performed our analysis and created the charts in Sentieo, watch our basic and advanced data visualization webinars and read this data visualization guide. You can also check out our full video library.

The post Earnings Season Tips appeared first on Sentieo.

1. VIX Index: We have entered a high-volatility market regime

2. Credit spreads are shooting up

3. Mortgage rates have increased considerably in the last 6-12 months, affecting several sectors (showing US 30-year fixed rate mortgage)

4. US consumer sentiment is extremely poor

5. Inflation (and transcripts with mentions of inflation) are at very high levels

6. All broad equity indices are down double-digits YTD: SPY, EFA, EEM, QQQ

7. Unusual, given the move in equities, fixed income is down across instruments: AGG, LQD, HYG, SRLN and more

8. Within the US equity sectors, XLE trounces all YTD

9. “High-duration” sectors like $XBI Biotechs, FINX Fintech, SPAK SPACs have done much worse than the broad indices YTD

10. SaaS valuations (looking at the average CLOU holding EV/NTM Sales) have been cut in half YTD

11. Within energy, AMLP midstream has done worse versus the large-caps XLE, services OIH and E&P XOP

12. 183 US-listed Biotechs trade at negative enterprise value, in contrast to just 13 a year ago (XBI)

13. The crypto winter is here, with large declines for Bitcoin and crypto-related equities

14. Searches for stagflation, recession, and inflation have been moving up considerably

15. May 2022 had the second highest number of call transcripts mentioning “recession” in recent year, after May 2020

16. Perhaps some green shoots regarding inflation, current estimates for the revenues of the fertilizer companies point to 2022 being the high point, as we can see with the MOS revenue estimates by year

17. Similarly, the trend in XOM’s revenue estimates could indicate longer-term moderation in commodity prices

To learn more about how we performed our analysis and created the charts in Sentieo, watch our basic and advanced data visualization webinars and read this data visualization guide.

The post Mid-Year Review in Charts 2022 appeared first on Sentieo.

We don’t envy the challenges investment management firms face daily. 

Complex regulatory requirements. Data-intensive business models. Competitors introducing disruptive technologies. Legacy system incompatibility and sprawl. It’s enough to cause stressful days and sleepless nights for leaders tasked with driving innovation and solutions around these issues.

Many cloud-based technologies provide frameworks that allow innovation leaders, CIO’s, research directors, and portfolio managers to scale solutions for their business needs more effectively and efficiently than on-premise (“on-prem”) solutions can offer. But even with clear-cut advantages provided by cloud solutions, concerns can arise regarding security, uptime/operational resiliency, and how cloud technologies map to regulatory guidelines.

These tradeoffs need to be evaluated by a firm based on their operating model, with evaluations taking into account both off-the-shelf and bespoke software options (no wonder that the global software consulting has become a $200 billion industry!)¹

Unlocking the Power of Investment Research with Cloud Technology

Investment management companies know that the core driver for their firms’ performance is their investment research: sound research drives new investment ideas. When done well, research can help firms capture that elusive alpha. 

As a result, when narrowing our focus to evaluate most investment managers’ research management processes, the value a cloud-based approach can provide starts to emerge. Leveraging the power of cloud computing as part of a research management system (RMS) can: 

• Drive significant workflow efficiency improvements across research and investment teams
• Create a centralized, standardized platform for collaboration, regardless of team member locations
• Provide real-time visibility into investment theses for key internal stakeholders (eg, portfolio managers)
• Deliver a single, secure source of truth to guard IP and streamline compliance reporting preparation

In the evaluation process, we don’t want to downplay the importance of addressing any concerns that may result from a move to the cloud vs legacy on-prem strategies. When assessing RMS vendors who’ve transitioned to the cloud, due diligence should include understanding a vendor’s:

• Data protection and access controls, both while in transit and at rest
• Standards for high availability, especially for global organizations
• Information security and infrastructure designed around risk management best-practices
• Compliance with global security standards

Takeaways

Your research team likely developed an organic approach to getting their work done; we’ve seen it with many companies. But more often than not, these approaches have either relied on clunky internal systems or are patchworked across multiple, disjointed software programs that provide limited visibility across teams.

Cloud-based RMS technologies have emerged that can help with creating more efficient workflows, improved collaboration, and better visibility of research outputs for organizations. These tools can be an important, high-impact step in an investment manager’s digital transformation journey. Take time to do your due diligence and find your best fit, and you can unlock more of your research team’s valuable insights.

1. https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/report/software-consulting-global-market-report

The post Practical Cloud Solutions for Innovation Leaders at Investment Firms appeared first on Sentieo.

With the Q1 2022 reporting season coming to an end, excessively rocky markets, and an aggressive tightening by global central bankers, these are the major themes that stood out to us. Sentieo clients can request our customizable Risk Monitoring dashboard (short video walk-through) for their accounts which covers multiple indicators, from volatility to credit spreads to daily changes in rates to trading volumes to sentiment to cross-correlations between the major equity ETFs. We are also seeing one of our favorite screens from the covid sell-off getting more and more names (conservatively financed revenue growers with attractive FCF yields and high ROIC).

1. We have been in a high volatility regime this year: while the daily spikes in the VIX index dominate the headlines, a smoother moving average shows that we are above the long-term mean (19.6) and median (17.1) for the indicator.

(public chart link)

Looking at a one-year chart of the VIX with a 50-day moving average, we can see that volatility bottomed in Q3 2021, and has been moving upwards steadily.

(public chart link)

2. Even traditional conservatively positioned portfolios are doing poorly as the move in interest rates has impacted fixed income assets across the spectrum (government, corporates and asset-backed). For example, a 50/50 SPY (S&P 500 ETF) and AGG (Barclays US Aggregate Bond Index ETF) is down 11% YTD as of “pixel time”, a highly unusual situation.

(public chart link) 

For positive YTD returns, investors would have had to have substantial commodity exposure: a portfolio with 20% each SPY, AGG, MNA (merger arb ETF), GLD (gold) and USO (oil futures; risks) ekes out a positive 5% YTD return.

(public chart link)

3. Inflation is a major topic on conference calls: we see a large spike in transcripts that mention inflation this year, overlaid with the YoY% change in CPI-U (Sentieo users: FRED Macro data set CPIAUCSL, YoY % Change).

(public chart link)

4. Inflation, especially commodity inflation, is resulting in margin compression across sectors. For example, the average EBIT margin in the S&P 500 Household and Personal Care companies (PG, CL, CHD, CLX, KMB) is at a decade+ low.

(public chart link)

5. The upwards move in rates is affecting rate-sensitive sectors, such as real estate. The standard US 30-year fixed rate mortgage is at a 10+ year high, and homebuilders (using the ITB ETF) and brokerages (ZG RDFN RLGY) have declined.

(public chart link)

6. In terms of sector performance, energy and agriculture/fertilizer stocks have been standouts YTD. Global energy (IXC) is up north of 30%, pipelines (AMLP) up 20%, and global agriculture producers (VEGI), up 10%+. 

(public chart link)

7. Equity sectors that have been hit hard YTD are SaaS names (CLOU) and biotechs (XBI), down about 30% and 35%, respectively.

(public chart link)

8. Digging deeper into the fixed income markets, we see negative returns across the board, regardless of credit or seniority: the broad AGG (mentioned above), 7-10 and 20+ year Treasurys (IEF and TLT), IG and HY corporates (LQD and HYG), senior loans (SRLN), and mortgage REITs (REM). Credit investor clients can request our Credit Portfolio Monitoring Dashboard (video walk-through) or, for idea generation, our Credit Topic Monitoring dashboard (video walk-through).

(public chart link)

9. And there are “hidden” volatility winners: for example, EBIT grows quite a bit with volatility for the sole publicly traded high frequency firm Virtu (VIRT): we can plot YoY% change in EBIT against the VIX.

(public chart link)

To learn more about how we performed our analysis and created the charts in Sentieo, watch our basic and advanced data visualization webinars and read this data visualization guide.

The post Q1 2022 Themes in 11 Charts appeared first on Sentieo.

This month’s release focuses on creating better integrated workflows while also helping customers get proprietary data off their desktops and into the Sentieo platform to unlock powerful insights.

In our latest release, we are introducing:

Sentieo Connect to Leverage the Power of Your Firm’s Data

Sentieo Connect is a powerful new feature that allows users to upload and integrate their proprietary and 3rd party data, including items like analyst-driven estimates, price targets, and other model outputs, as well as portfolio holdings driven out of portfolio accounting systems.

Once uploaded, analysts and PMs can use their data alongside Sentieo-sourced data to create better integrated workflows and more seamless monitoring of investment universes and portfolios using tools like Dashboard, Screener and Plotter.

Expanded Ticker Type Support for Watchlist Imports

We’ve enabled our Watchlist Manager with support for a broader list of ticker types that can be utilized in CSV uploads, allowing users a quicker path to building and using robust watchlists.      

Open Access Beta for New User Experience

As Sentieo continues to look for ways to create better user interactions with our system, we’ve undertaken a platform design initiative, with the goal of making the overall experience more seamless, the journey more contextual and the design more consistent.

Users now have the opportunity to try out the new experience for yourself, as we’ve opened up the beta environment (named Vega) to all users. Try it out today and let us know what you think!

If you are a current Sentieo user, log into Sentieo to read the April 2022 release notes. If you’d like to learn more about the Sentieo Platform, contact us today to meet with a solution executive.

The post April 2022 Release Highlights appeared first on Sentieo.

(public chart viewer link)

The higher-frequency data since we published the piece continues to indicate double-digit housing inflation, which we expect will be working itself into the CPI regardless of what happens to the more volatile components, like energy (see our “Higher for Longer” piece predicting high oil and gas prices back from October 2021 due to the dramatic decrease in capex spend). 

For example, several Residential REITs presented at conferences in March, and guided to 12-16% “blended” (new and renewal leases) rate increases for Q1 2022 (see our Snippets “Side by Side” view video), 

Redfin’s data also continues to be torrid: record high condo prices, record high single-family prices, 15% average rent price increases, record number of bidding wars in February 2022, and similar. 

Potentially counteracting the growth in prices has been the recent increase in mortgage rates: while low by historical standards, we recently saw the standard 30-year rate approaching 4.5%. We say “potentially” because US housing is underbuilt especially when considering the millennial generation “bump”, and, additionally, a larger percentage of home buyers are investors less dependent on traditional mortgage financing: the National Association of Realtors data points to 22% of buyers being investors, up from 15%, and cash offers being almost one third of transactions, also up considerably from a year ago.

(public chart viewer link)

So, without a major increase in housing supply on the horizon, and higher rates possibly being less effective than before, we continue to expect that the double-digit housing inflation rate to persist, and this will keep CPI elevated for a long period of time, as outlined in our FT piece.

Get in touch if you’d like to learn more about using the Sentieo platform in your research process.

The post Housing Inflation Will Keep US CPI Elevated appeared first on Sentieo.

Some of these ideas came from our very popular white paper, 72 Consumer Trends for 2022, but we have been using stacked trends in our long-running blog series on pumpkin spice everything, where we chronicled sheer absurdities like pumpkin-spice spam and pumpkin-spice ramen noodles. We prematurely declared that pumpkin spice is over in 2019, only to admit defeat in 2021.

So how do stacked trends play into Valentine’s Day? We will show you three searches, and you can sequence what happens at scale. We spotted the Valentine’s Day seasonality for certain terms while doing work for our 72 Consumer Trends paper. 

Roses 

We can see that searches for roses exhibit a very clear seasonal spike in the week of Valentine’s Day. The secondary bump in May is around the US Mother’s Day, celebrated on the second Sunday in May. Rose price spikes around that time are a favorite topic for economists. Even the World Economic Forum has weighed in, presumably after their famous Davos conference.

Plan B

Plan B (a brand name for levonorgestrel) is an emergency oral contraceptive pill. We also see the Valentine’s Day seasonality there as well. The big December 2021 spike was linked, in our view, to a controversial Texas reproductive law. What is more interesting is that the spike follows the roses search by one week: for example, in 2021, roses spiked during the week of February 7th, while Plan B searches spiked during the week of February 14th.

Pregnancy Test 

Closing the loop, searches for pregnancy tests spike dramatically in the 2nd half of March. We are not going to count the weeks for you but you get the idea. (Watch us going over the Fundamental Xray Dashboard loaded with 10 years of financials for pregnancy test maker Church & Dwight here.)

Get in touch if you’d like to learn more about using the Sentieo platform in your research process.

The post People are So Predictable, Valentine’s Day Edition appeared first on Sentieo.

“I did not know you could do that in Sentieo” is something we hear quite often from the users of our award-winning research platform, from advanced search, to complex screening and data visualizations. To address this frequent feedback, we decided to share some of our top webinars, guides, and blog posts in one place below. 

On Demand Webinars 

“Liberate yourself from Ctrl-F” (Part 2) – the Advanced user version of our Document Search webinar continues to be very popular with existing clients. We go over more advanced functions, such as document section searches, speaker searches, footnote searches, combining multiple Boolean operators, dynamic synonym suggestions, workflows around watchlists, qualitative factors, document trends, NLP heatmaps, NLP topics, redlining, table chaining and visualization, and more. 

“Advanced data visualization” – another Advanced version of our module-focused webinars, this webinar focuses on Sentieo’s data visualization engine Plotter. We go over advanced hybrid series such as rolling correlations, sector-level relative valuation and profit pool analysis, dashboard templates, benchmarking visualizations, and more. 

“Sentieo for ESG Research”– in this webinar, we go over how the full platform can be used specifically for ESG research, and ESG research management. We go over advanced queries, available ESG document sets, ESG-specific dashboards and visualizations. We also discuss the need for proper research management: from templates for notes from management meetings to proxy voting records to dashboards, version control, and auditability. 

Guides

 A New Approach to ESG Research Integration– this guide is designed to help institutional investors explore a new, integrated approach to ESG research management that can overcome the challenges and maximize the opportunities of ESG investing.

Gaining Competitive Advantage with Investment Research Through the Use of Artificial Intelligence and Other Technologies– this guide from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services looks at the direct applications of modern technologies in the research process, from tackling unstructured data to holistic workflow strategies. 

A New Generation of Research Management Systems– this Celent Briefing note goes over the must-haves in modern research management systems. Creating, systematizing, searching, and protecting internally-generated IP is a common problem for all knowledge-heavy organizations. 

Financial Data Visualization and Analysis Guide– in this guide, we go over a range of financial data visualizations and analyses in Sentieo’s data visualization engine Plotter. Every example has an embedded in-pdf video for a direct “how to” demonstration. 

Blog Posts

8 Ways to Integrate ESG Research for UN PRI Compliance (March 2021) – the increasing importance of the PRI initiative is evidenced by both the growth in signatories and AUM. In this blog post, our head product specialist goes over some of the ways our clients integrate ESG into their workflow inside the Sentieo research platform. 

Sentieo Platform Integrations Facilitate Enterprise Deployments (May 2021) – extensive integrations are a must for any research platform looking to unite internal and external IP alongside existing productivity tools like Slack and Outlook. In this blog, we go over some of the existing platform integrations currently deployed by our 1,100+ institutional and corporate clients. 

Freight Woes Threaten The Holiday Shopping Season (September 2021) – while the port congestion problems are headline news now, we saw the dire retailer inventory levels in the data back in August using our platform to analyze the sector. See the sector-level analysis and visualizations, and more.

Using AI to Find the Key Themes This Earnings Season: Office REITs Hurt by Slow Return to the Office (November 2020) – the “ great return to the office” has had several false starts globally. In this blog, we use Sentieo’s NLP applications to see what is happening in the sector, from section redlining heatmaps to transcript topic classifications across peers. 

To stay up to date on everything happening with Sentieo, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. 

The post Discovering Sentieo: Top Webinars, Guides, and Blog Posts appeared first on Sentieo.

Sentieo’s powerful and flexible Dashboards have grown dramatically in both client adoption and functionality since we introduced them two and a half years ago. Showcasing the depth of the research platform, the Dashboards bring together documents, document search, research management/research monitoring, financial and alternative data, data visualizations, Tableaus, iFrames, and much more, through over 50 different widget types. 

Sentieo clients can build their own Dashboards, and have access to pre-built general as well as industry- and function-specific Dashboards. Over time, we have rolled out specialized Dashboards such as Credit Position Monitoring (video walk-through), Special Situations (video walk-through), ESG Topic Monitoring (video walk-through), and our Sustainalytics integration (video walk-through and joint webinar). 

Following the high client demand for our recent Risk Monitoring Dashboard (blog post with video-walk through), today we are introducing two additional dashboards: US Macro and Credit Themes. Below you will find brief descriptions, screenshots, and video walkthroughs of both. 

US Macroeconomic Dashboard 

This Dashboard uses mostly our FRED Macro integration to bring in 21 data visualizations of various macroeconomic data sets, from GDP growth, to inflation, changes in the money supply, housing starts, and credit spreads.

If you’d like a more detailed walkthrough of the dashboard, please watch the video below.

Credit Topics Dashboard 

The Credit Topics Dashboard is useful for idea generation and general conditions monitoring. We see incoming mentions of terms like covenant breach and bridge loans, along with upcoming maturities, new issuances of both debt and equity, as well as data visualizations of the overall credit market conditions. 

If you’d like a more detailed walkthrough of the dashboard, please watch the video below.

To learn more about Sentieo, please visit our Resources page for guides and recorded webinars, or request a demo. 

The post Macroeconomic and Credit Topics Dashboards in Sentieo appeared first on Sentieo.