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.

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.

This time around, we’re exploring how technology is helping to manage this problem it helped create. 

AI, machine learning, and natural language processing have led to the development of tools analysts can use to overcome research process efficiency challenges and supercharge the hunt for alpha. While none of these tools replace humans, they augment the decision-making process and ultimately help to build more robust investment cases. 

Download full graphic.

Emotions like overconfidence or fear can lead to significant inefficiencies that provide a valuable alpha source. Sentiment analysis tracks what executives are saying about a company, which can be compared to competitor statements or other analysts’ commentary. 

Sentieo partnered with the Harvard Business Review (HBR) to publish a briefing paper highlighting how inefficient research processes can hinder a firm’s pursuit of alpha. It also explores the idea that while technology is part of the cause, intensifying the flow of information, it can also play a role in the solution.

If you liked what we covered today, feel free to check out the blog post with further insights on this topic or download the full briefing paper here.

The post Overcoming Information Overload: 5 Ways AI is Helping 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 results, 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 the:

• 39-widget “Fundamentals X-Ray” (video walk-through)
• Special Situations (video walk-through)
• Credit (video walk-through)
• ESG Topic Monitoring (video walk-through)
• Sustainalytics integration (video walk-through and joint webinar)

The new Risk Monitoring Dashboard (available to clients upon request) provides a comprehensive look at financial markets conditions across a variety of metrics, from macro, to credit, to equities, as well as aggregate NLP sentiment from transcripts, document trends, news, technical analysis, and more.

In the partial screenshot below, we display six out of the eighteen different widgets. Clients can add and delete widgets to customize further as well as share the dashboard internally with their team.   

For a detailed video walkthrough of every indicator included, please watch this video: Video: Sentieo Risk Monitoring Dashboard

If you are interested in building your own data visualization Dashboard in Sentieo, this is the “how to” video (including Sentieo’s data visualization engine Plotter, Tableaus, and iFrames): Video: Adding Data Visualization Widets in Sentieo Dashboards

Learn more about Sentieo’s data visualization capabilities in our Basic and Advanced Data Visualization webinars, or contact us to schedule a demo.

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In the first two blogs in this series on turning investment research into competitive advantage, based on a briefing paper we sponsored with the Harvard Business Review, we discussed some of the challenges analysts face when researching opportunities and how tools leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) can provide a solution.

In this final blog, we explore how AI can improve workflows and best practices for putting these tools into action.

A central source

Analysts are probably more interested in the potential applications of AI tools like semantic analysis, topic modeling, and named entity recognition rather than the science behind them. After all, the way they add value is through ease of use and by enhancing the research process.

Take an investment thesis, for example. Once an analyst completes a thesis, in many cases, it’s saved in a folder on the company server and then sent to a portfolio manager attached to an email. Tracking it down months later because a relevant opportunity has emerged is a waste of an analyst’s time. 

A centralized platform which uses AI to curate theses, notes, and presentations, is a much more efficient way of storing research output. Hosting the platform on the cloud means that analysts can upload or retrieve information from any device, while it also gives research directors a real-time overview of the team’s workflow. Incidentally, cloud computing has become an essential technology during the pandemic- spending is expected to increase by 30% this year across all industries, according to Forrester Research.  

A centralized platform also helps develop a more robust investment thesis. When a firm produces research on two companies within the same industry, variations in the approach taken by the analysts could lead to missed opportunities or, even worse, poor investment decisions. But when that information is presented in a standardized format, it’s more likely to highlight qualitative differences between the companies rather than inconsistencies in the way the analysts work. 

A regulatory paper trail

Staying on the right side of the regulatory authorities, especially in a sector as heavily regulated as finance, helps firms avoid hefty penalties issued for compliance breaches and prevents the inevitable damage to their reputation. A centralized platform effectively creates a paper trail, so if the regulator asks a firm to justify an investment decision or a response to a corporate action, the relevant information can be quickly and easily accessed.

Making the case

While AI tools may seem like the perfect solution to the information overload suffered by many analysts, poor implementation can add to the burden. As with any digital transformation project, firms must fully understand what problems they’re addressing and the capabilities of their people.

Having a change management strategy in place is important so analysts know why and how you’re introducing a new solution. It should also ease any concerns about technology eventually replacing them.

But don’t let these considerations allow your firm to delay making a decision- those that fail to embrace the latest innovations risk losing ground to their more tech-savvy competitors.

Download the full briefing paper here.

The post How to Turn Investment Research into Competitive Advantage: Putting AI Tools Into Action appeared first on Sentieo.

Technology may have contributed to this overload, but it can also help to manage it. So in this post, we’re going to explore how advances in AI, machine learning, and natural language processing have led to the development of tools which analysts can use to overcome these challenges and supercharge the hunt for alpha. While none of these tools replace humans, they augment the decision-making process and ultimately help to build stronger investment cases. 

Profit and margin are two key pieces of information when researching a company. But how many other terms can be used to describe the same thing? Profit has 45 synonyms according to thesaurus.com, and margin has 30. Different meanings typically cause programmes designed to do investment research to return a lot of useless information from scanned documents. However, semantic analysis algorithms understand sentences by breaking down their structure and recognizing combinations of words, making sure analysts only receive the most relevant results. 

Analysts can use a process called topic modelling to uncover major themes within a document or a set of documents. Algorithms can be trained to scan pages of text and detect patterns or recurring words to reveal the topics that come up most frequently.  

AI tools can crunch numerical data as well as textual data. They automate the tasks of identifying trends hidden in the numbers and comparing a company’s results with previous financial years or their competitors. Eliminating the need to copy and paste figures from one spreadsheet to another and having to ask a colleague to double-check their work for accuracy, means analysts can focus their efforts on processing the data and uncovering investment opportunities they might have otherwise missed.  

Certain employees are critical to a company’s success. While the passing of Steve Jobs was widely mourned, the departure of Apple’s Chief Design Officer Jony Ives didn’t make as many headlines, even though he played an intricate role in the design of the iPhone (not to mention the company’s other products). Analysts can now keep track of executives and employees as they move from one job to another using named entity recognition, which takes into account variations such as middle initials or misspellings.   

Market sentiment has a major influence on share prices. Emotions like overconfidence or fear lead to inefficiencies which provide a valuable source of alpha. That’s why many analysts are keen to capture the mood of investors. Sentiment analysis tracks what executives are saying about a company, which can then be compared with statements from competitors or commentary by other analysts in the financial media or on social media.  

In the third and final blog post in this series, we’ll explore how AI can improve workflows and some best practices for putting these tools into action. Alternatively, you can download the full briefing paper here. 

The post How to Turn Investment Research into Competitive Advantage: Leveraging AI appeared first on Sentieo.

Sentieo recently partnered with the Harvard Business Review (HBR) to publish a briefing paper explaining how research powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can provide a source of competitive advantage for investment firms. The paper highlighted how inefficient research processes can hinder a firm’s pursuit of alpha and while technology is part of the cause, intensifying the flow of information, it can also play a role in the solution.

In this first of a series of three blog posts summarising the paper’s findings, we explore some of the challenges that analysts face when researching investment opportunities.

Information overload

Companies across all industries struggle with the sheer volume of information they must process. Research by HBR in 2019 showed that 82% of respondents struggled with analyzing unstructured data and 77% relied on manual methods. The burden is even greater in the investment industry due to the regulatory demands of listed companies. The Securities and Exchange Commission alone processes around 3,000 filings each day.

Many analysts also need to research industry trends to build a credible investment thesis. That means combing through additional layers of information. For instance, one database of North American manufacturers covers half a million suppliers and has published 300,000 articles.

All this information comes in different formats, which makes it hard to collate. Analysts typically monitor a range of sources when researching a company. A news story on the Wall Street Journal may prompt an idea which requires further investigation through search engines, data terminals and reports. That’s why the information is known as unstructured- it comes as spreadsheets, PDFs, videos and even social media posts.

In the absence of a central platform, most analysts build their own system to track developments, manage the information they gather and share it with colleagues. How much of it gets lost in the process is anyone’s guess.

To uncover insights, analysts must spend countless hours sifting through the information manually. But that’s hardly an effective use of their time. Minor distractions, such as searching for an email, on their own may not cause much disruption, but they add up. Valuable nuggets of information could also be hidden in instant messages, Slack channels and transcripts from virtual meetings. These distractions eventually affect an employee’s happiness and productivity, especially when that employee is a highly qualified analyst.

You didn’t hire these well-paid individuals to organize information, you hired them to analyze it and come up with actionable ideas which will help your firm deliver benchmarking-beating returns. After all, information inefficiencies lead to alpha which sets active managers apart from passive investments like exchange-traded funds and index trackers. This added value has become particularly important as money flows out of actively managed funds and into passive funds.

Analysts need access to tools to do their job more efficiently, but the investment industry has traditionally been slow to adopt new technologies. So in the next blog in this series, we’ll explore how AI, machine learning and natural language processing can help to ease the burden of information overload. Alternatively, you can download the full briefing paper here.

The post How to Turn Investment Research into Competitive Advantage appeared first on Sentieo.

We are excited to continue the evolution of our integrations to support enterprise-class research platform deployments. With the Sentieo V4.6 release, we are launching Sentieo Platform Integrations, a suite of existing (e.g., Slack, Evernote, Microsoft Office) and new ways to integrate with Sentieo.

“We are seeing increased demand for large-scale, enterprise deployments of modern investment research platforms. Sentieo Platform Integrations is going to deliver new ways for our clients to get insights, from all their research content, while providing the opportunity to leave behind failed RMS integrations.”

Naman Shah, Co-Founder & President, Sentieo

New integrations include support for bringing research and other content from Box and Dropbox into Sentieo Document Search, and Sentieo Platform APIs for notes integration and Security Master management to facilitate large-scale enterprise deployments of Sentieo.

We are also opening up access to our Smart Summary sentiment and topic analysis so uploaded content, such as earnings call draft transcripts, can be run through our models.

This latest release also includes:

• more enhancements to our new iPhone app, including the ability to now access Price Monitor
• more flexibility for dashboard viewing and sharing
• more features to improve your thesis sheets

With even more support for existing content, tools, and workflows, investment analysts and corporate researchers will save more time, reduce context switching between disparate systems, and bring the power of Sentieo’s AI-powered search and analytics to all of their content.

Sentieo users can learn more about the Sentieo V4.6 release in the release notes. If you are not yet a customer and would like to experience the difference an integrated research management platform can make, contact us for a free trial.

The post Sentieo V4.6: Enterprise-Class Research Platform Deployments with Box, Dropbox, and new APIs appeared first on Sentieo.

The State of ESG Research Management

With public, investor, and regulatory pressures rising to integrate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles and transparency into investment research and decisions, institutional investors are struggling to find, analyze, and centralize the deluge of information provided by companies and ratings organizations. 

In fact, research conducted by McKinsey in 2019 “highlighted that while 90 percent of companies report on sustainability, only 15 percent of investors can successfully integrate this information into their investment decisions.”

The lack of ability to effectively and efficiently integrate ESG factors into investment research workflows leads to a significant amount of time wasted by expensive ESG and fundamental analysts, missed insights that could deliver better results, and a lack of confidence in ESG-driven investment decisions.

ESG Investing: Mainstream & Delivering Results

ESG investing has come a long way since Who Cares Wins, the report that made the case for integrating ESG factors into capital markets, was published in 2005.

Long considered a niche investment strategy, ESG investing has become mainstream, with assets under management using sustainable investment strategies on the rise across the globe:

The US SIF Foundation’s 2020 biennial Report on US Sustainable and Impact Investing Trends found that sustainable investing assets account for $17.1 trillion or 33% of the total U.S. assets under professional management–a 42% increase over 2018.

PwC Luxembourg’s late 2020 report, The growth opportunity of the century, called ESG a “paradigm shift” with European ESG assets forecast to make up “41% to 57% of total fund assets in the region, compared to the 15% of assets ESG accounted for at the end of 2019.”

In 2019, research from The Economist Intelligence Unit found that 76% of Gen X and Millennials in the UK say “it’s increasingly important to consider ESG factors when investing.”

And from Morningstar to Morgan Stanley, JUST Capital, RBC Global Investment Management, and Goldman Sachs, research shows that ESG investing pays off in terms of performance and returns.

ESG Research Obstacles

Despite strong returns and rising interest in ESG investing, institutional investors continue to struggle with the best way to confidently integrate ESG factors and research outputs into investment decision-making processes.

Proliferation of documents and data

The growing amount of financial and non-financial data points and documents that need to be consumed by ESG analysts and the typically small teams doing primary research is overwhelming, requiring complex fact-finding exercises and use of multiple tools and channels for sourcing from:

• Publicly-traded companies
• ESG ratings organizations (such as Sustainalytics, JUST Capital, and MSCI)
• Sell-side research
• Industry oversight groups

Lack of transparency and standardization

There are no standards for corporate sustainability reporting and disclosures as there are for financial disclosures, making it difficult to validate claims and reconcile this information to make comparisons between companies.The same thing applies to the growing body of third-party ratings, all of which have their own methodologies for evaluating a company’s track record on ESG factors.

Fractured research workflows

With disjointed processes and systems used to conduct and track research across teams of ESG and fundamental analysts, capturing and auditing all of the source material and engagement interactions–internally across teams and externally with company management–is time consuming and resource intensive at best and nearly impossible at worst.

Regulation on the Rise

When it comes to transparency and standardization of methodologies and reporting to support ESG investment strategies, legislators and regulators are starting to step up, particularly in Europe.

Europe’s SFDR Deadline Approaching

The first major milestone in the European Commission’s Action Plan on sustainable finance is swiftly approaching, with a March 10, 2021 deadline for compliance with SFDR, the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation. SFDR imposes transparency and disclosure requirements on institutional investors and asset managers, including:

• Written policies on the integration of sustainability risks in the investment decision-making process
• Information on the methodologies used to assess, evaluate, and monitor the effectiveness of sustainable investments
• Periodic reports on the impacts of sustainable investments

UNPRI Signatories Growing

Some 2,600 global asset owners and managers, representing $103 trillion in assets, have committed to incorporating ESG issues into their investment analysis and decision-making investment processes by signing the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI). Compliance with UNPRI mandates includes:

• Incorporation of ESG factors into 50% of total AUM
• Centralized capture and aggregate reporting of both internal and external engagement on ESG factors

SEC Exploring ESG Disclosure Standards

With Europe moving full speed ahead on regulating ESG disclosures, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is looking to catch up with the agency’s investment committee recommending with creation in May 2020 of a framework for ESG disclosure.

A New Approach to ESG Research Integration

Positive performance and returns combined with growing public, investor, and regulatory pressures to integrate ESG factors into investment strategies is driving greater interest in a new, integrated approach to ESG research management that incorporates content aggregation, NLP-powered search, notes standardization, and compliance in a single platform.

Learn more in the guide we put together 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.

The post A New Approach to ESG Research Integration appeared first on Sentieo.

Even before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we started to see a transformation in the types of internal communication and collaboration tools being used by workers in the modern business landscape. Gone are the days of archaic email and phone calls.

Instead, efficiency and productivity in the workplace has been streamlined by team collaboration software which is now at the center of workplace communication. Instead of conference rooms and standup meetings, companies are beginning to leverage the use of collaboration software like instant messaging and video conferencing to ensure team members are connected and can directly communicate and collaborate to get work done.

The adoption of new tools to make collaboration easier should mean improved efficiency and productivity for workers, but requires making sure that the right software is chosen to get the job done. Because of this best of breed approach to technology that requires teams to rely on a combination of tools to get work done,  there is a bunch of back and forth between apps that can slow you down.

We’ve rolled out a Sentieo app for Slack to help alleviate the friction of switching between apps in your workflow. Once connected, your Sentieo notes and Slack conversations are brought together seamlessly, allowing you to take advantage of best of breed tools for communication and collaboration and easily create, share, and discuss your Sentieo work directly in Slack.

Post Notes to Slack

Keep your notes and conversations in the same place by sharing your notes to Slack, directly from Sentieo. Simply select the Send to Slack option in any note and you’ll be able to specify the DM or channel as well as an optional message. The note will then immediately be posted to the selected conversation.

See Note Previews in Slack

Once a note is posted to Slack, the following information will be showcased: comment (if included), title, metadata including tags, and a preview of the contents.  Your colleagues in Slack will know exactly what your note is all about without having to move between platforms and opening it in Sentieo.

Find Your Sentieo Content in Slack

Through Slack’s search capabilities, you’ll also be able to quickly find Sentieo notes that have been shared in Slack based on the content of those notes.

With the Sentieo app for Slack, your notes and conversations are brought together seamlessly so teams can easily collaboration. Start using the integration today to streamline your team’s information sharing. Find out how in the Sentieo Support Center here, or contact us for a free trial.

The post Sentieo and Slack: Your Notes and Conversations, Together appeared first on Sentieo.

In next week’s webinar, we will go over building a thesis in Sentieo’s RMS (Research Management System).

We still come across many haphazard systems for research management (from consumer apps to “systems” with no connection to the rest of your workflow). This leads to several problems:

Analyst Inefficiency

The lack of integration with the rest of your workflow is costing you time. Switching from a data terminal to a document reading/search to Excel to a collaboration software all day, every day adds up.

Portfolio Manager Inefficiencies

How much time do PMs spend on catching up/supervision? Now monitoring note-taking, thesis building, and active theses can simply be done via widgets in one of the dashboards that you have in your Sentieo platform.

Internal and External Compliance

How much time does your team spend meeting compliance requirements? Strict access and version control, along with powerful search enable the fulfillment of compliance-related requests in seconds.

Lack of IP Control and Standardization

Disparate tools, even within the same team, and inconsistent formatting/content make it difficult to control and standardize your intellectual property.

Having a purpose-built, integrated, and flexible RMS is essential to improving your investment process. 

In the webinar, we will cover multiple aspects of thesis building and updating, including:

• Collecting information from everywhere in the Sentieo platform
• Contributing information from outside sources
• Versioning
• Collaboration
• Dashboard monitoring

We will also discuss specific elements like structured fields, sections, attachments, updates, and version control, as well as the broader research management from a PM’s viewpoint.

Register now for this December 10th webinar.

The post Webinar Preview: Building a Winning Thesis appeared first on Sentieo.

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.