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No More Stranded Documents

Do you have…

• 5 years of an expensive industry weekly archived on your laptop?
• Powerpoint presentations from past conferences that you know are full of great data that you just can’t find?
• A decade’s worth of meeting minutes organized by topic?

While we are constantly adding more and more valuable documents to Sentieo (51 million and counting!), we realize that many of your most valuable documents are your own.  With a Box or Dropbox integration you can make these documents a part of your Sentieo workflow.  

Easy to Set Up, Seamless to Use

With a few clicks you can sync your existing Box or Dropbox folder structure with Sentieo, choose which of your existing documents to include, and configure the sync to automatically upload new files.  Tickers and tags can be added on import for easy searching and filtering.  

Once synced your folder structure and documents become a source in Sentieo’s Document Search.  Your documents are searchable using all of our query operators and categories, filterable by your folder structure, and ready to be highlighted and worked with in Notebook. 

For Sentieo users, step by step instructions can be accessed in the Support Center.

Contact us to learn more about putting the power of the Sentieo financial and corporate research platform to work in your organization.

The post Your Valuable Documents, Our Powerful Search appeared first on Sentieo.

Over the last 12 months, we have participated in a variety of roundtable discussions and webinars on the topic of earnings prep for investor relations. These events helped us identify that industry-leading IR teams are constantly reviewing how their peers message topics when drafting their earnings calls. This has become a standard practice, but we are now seeing a new trend emerge. With algorithms on the rise that can pick up on sentiment and tonality, earnings calls are not just judged by what is said, but by how it is delivered. This is forcing IR teams to scrutinize every word their CEO/CFO is going to say to deliver the best messaging and have a successful earnings call.

What is Smart Summary^TM?

Sentieo introduced Smart Summary in 2019 to help financial analysts uncover insights from earnings calls by leveraging natural language processing. Smart Summary is a proprietary machine learning model created by Sentieo that is meant to mimic the analysis of an equity analyst on earnings calls, both classifying language into different buckets (i.e., business drivers, revenue, guidance, ESG) and overlaying sentiment to understand if something is positive, negative, or neutral in nature.

IR teams leverage Sentieo’s Smart Summary to see how the language on earnings calls is interpreted by algorithms designed with a buy-side lens. IR teams are able to easily compare how the same business topics have been discussed over time, and can analyze changes in sentiment at a topical level over time and across different companies/industries.

Since the release of Smart Summary, IR teams have consistently asked: “Can I run Smart Summary’s model on my earnings call draft before we have our call?”

Introducing Smart Summary on Prepared Statements

So much time and effort goes into drafting prepared statements for an earnings call. Given volatility around earnings, it’s always nice to have a final spot-check. Algorithms driven by machine learning can pick up what the naked eye (or multiple sets of eyes) might miss.

With that in mind, we are opening up our Smart Summary model to our clients so they can test how their commentary will be interpreted before they have their earnings call. This will enable teams to test their prepared language on the fly to see:

• How language will be classified: is this a business driver, does this fall under ESG, or does it sound like we are deflecting?
• How sentiment is interpreted: are we using too much negative language when discussing our financials?
• Compare side by side with your previously completed earnings calls: is there an obvious difference between how we are talking about competition and market share now vs. three months ago? Are we accomplishing our goal of changing our narrative around cost reduction and forward looking guidance?

Contact us to learn more about putting Smart Summary for uploaded documents to work in your earnings prep process.

The post Running Sentieo’s Sentiment Model on Uploaded Documents: Benefits for Investor Relations 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.

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.

This week, we have been highlighting how we use our integrated machine and deep learning applications, and our newly-released NLP Heatmaps to extract and summarize insights from unstructured data (transcripts, in this case) across an industry. So far we have covered the U.S. homebuilders, a sector doing enviably well with megatrend tailwinds mentioned on all calls, and restaurants, a sector showing good signs of recovery, with the most recent comparable sales being positive YoY for some of the largest names. 

Today we focus on the airlines, one of the hardest-hit sectors. We previously wrote about publicly available COVID-19 situation monitoring dashboards, including credit card spending and global travel restrictions. Specifically for air travel, we like the public Tableau dashboards from consulting giant BCG (see how easy it is to integrate Tableau in your Sentieo Dashboard here). 

While the U.S. airline industry has avoided bankruptcies due to government aid (in contrast to the several LatAm airlines that declared Chapter 11), the stock price performance overall has been pricing in a very slow recovery. The industry ETF, JETS, is down 50% YTD in contrast to the S&P 500 as a benchmark being flattish (interactive chart viewer) 

With most of the U.S. industry reporting, we use our NLP Heatmaps to see that overall sentiment around the broad Business Drivers NLP category is not only way worse than the pre-COVID-19 baseline but has also dropped quarter-over-quarter in some cases.

We are seeing the same dynamic in the broad Forward Guidance NLP category.

Looking across the industry, we see several common topics. Cash and cash burn are very much top of mind for the industry in survival mode. As we noted in a guest blog post for our search partner Workiva, cash burn disclosures for Q1 were a first for some of the airlines. 

“Everyone” mentions the CARES Act, which provided liquidity to the industry.

Operating expenses were down across the industry (as we can see by the green sentiment indicator before we even read the comments).

The COVID-19 pandemic is still very much talked about across all calls. 

We can also see the competitive strategy moves being discussed on the calls: for example, here we see UAL’s loyalty program move, as well as the AAL-JBLU tie-up in the Northeast, using our “expanded snippets” view.

Finally, using the in-product search function, we can get up to speed on the mixed July month-to-date comments.

As seen with the airline companies featured here, using advanced NLP and ML applications like our newly released NLP Topic & Sector Heatmaps dramatically improves efficiency in research and monitoring of both individual company and sector dynamics. These applications are a part of our industry-leading document search, which is combined with research management, financial data, dashboards, and more, in a unified full research workflow platform. 

To find out more about Sentieo, please get in touch with us. 

The post Earnings Season Highlight: Airlines Stuck at the Gate appeared first on Sentieo.

While technology companies have dominated the headlines as beneficiaries of the COVID-19 pandemic, a sector that has also benefited are U.S. homebuilders. In this blog post, we will use our NLP Heatmaps to extract the relevant information from recent industry transcripts. 

Homebuilders first came onto our radar as we saw that the primary industry ETF, the iShares U.S. Home Construction ITB, was up in the teens year-to-date, verus a flattish overall market (the S&P 500, as represented by the SPY ETF), and the Industrials ETF, XLI. 

[Interactive chart viewer]

We started digging deeper using our NLP and ML technology application to find answers fast.

The first thing that stood out to us was that Sentiment for the overall business drivers category (which consists of volume, pricing, revenue, margins, and other categories) for PulteGroup (NYSE: PHM) was the highest in at least five years. 

Expanding the broad category for PHM, we can get up to speed on their results: a mix of favorable and improving industry dynamics along with execution led to good results. Sales offices have reopened, the supply chain is working, and more.

Intrigued by the comments on the favorable industry dynamics, we opened our Comparison View which lets us look at comments on the same topics across peers, side-by-side and were able to get the industry-wide comments in seconds:

• “Dramatic rebound” in single-family home interest due to COVID-19
• Historically low interest rates 
• Very limited housing inventory 

Notably, all three were mentioned by all three builders that reported recently: PulteGroup (NYSE: PHM), Meritage Homes (NYSE: MTH), and TRI Pointe Group (NYSE: TPH). We can conclude with reasonable confidence that these industry tailwinds are, indeed, very real.  

We then dug deeper in one specific aspect of our Business Drivers category: pricing. The ability to drive pricing would confirm the tailwinds that all three companies discussed. And, again, all three homebuilders are moving pricing up. On all three calls analysts asked about pricing, and, on all three calls, the management teams were very positive on being able to increase prices. 

Another bullish confirmation is that all three companies are giving full-year guidance, which is notable since two had previously suspended their guidance. This is a strong sign of management confidence. 

As seen with the U.S. homebuilders featured here, using advanced NLP and ML applications like our newly released NLP Topic & Sector Heatmaps dramatically improves efficiency in research and monitoring of both individual company and sector dynamics. These applications are a part of our industry-leading document search, which is combined with research management, financial data, dashboards, and more, in a unified full workflow platform. 

To find out more about Sentieo, please get in touch with us. 

The post Earnings Season Highlight: US Homebuilders Showing Exceptional Strength appeared first on Sentieo.

There is no doubt that the pandemic and its impact on the economy, business performance, and society has created new reporting challenges for companies in the Software sector. In the runup to Q2 2020 earnings, our team tracked signals to identify trends. What they came away with were  four critical topics Software analysts should be tracking in the second half of the year. We detail each of these topics in our new market report: Top 4 Critical Themes for H2 2020 Software Analysts.

Today we’re coving the first: Pipeline Status

The COVID recession has resulted in widespread conference cancellations and budget cuts, while disruptions to daily life have made attracting the attention of buyers harder than ever.

At the same time, and perhaps surprisingly, we have observed a serious EV-to-Sales valuation expansion in the software space. In our SaaS sample below, the unweighted average EV to NTM Sales (in fuchsia) for about 20 names has expanded dramatically, from 13.5x at the start of the year to over 20x.

Given the lofty expectations going into the second half of the year, we expect a heavy emphasis by analysts on the state of the pipeline. Companies should be prepared to answer:

• What is taking place instead of industry and user conferences?
• What has been happening with the sales cycle?
• What percentage of large deals are getting pushed back because of budget cuts or general uncertainty?
• Have the travel restrictions affected the ability to sell beyond just the effect of the cancelled in-person events?

To read more of our findings for H2 2020, download the full report for Software analysts here. To read our take for investor relations check back here on Friday. Can’t wait that long? Download the full report “Market Report: Top 4 Critical Themes for H2 2020 Software IR”

The post Spotlight on Software: 4 Critical Themes for H2 2020 appeared first on Sentieo.

Investment professionals are required to process an endless amount of data from external sources (e.g. documents, broker research, financials). Combine that with all of the time it takes to properly absorb content created by you and your colleagues, and it makes it likely that you could be missing important information.

Sentieo’s Dashboard aggregates your internal and external data so that you don’t miss key information. Whether you want to use Sentieo for document search, note taking, or sophisticated financial/alternative data analysis, it’s all possible with our highly customizable Dashboard.

If you are new to Dashboard, please read this introductory blog post or, if you are a Sentieo customer, watch the short videos in the Sentieo Support Center. We go over the basic Dashboard functions—using widgets, adding tickers and watchlists, document widgets, notes widgets, and more.

With our most recent release, Sentieo V4.3, we are rolling out some exciting features in Dashboard. You will find new sector templates and widgets to add NLP Heatmaps, IFrames (including Tableau!), and RSS feeds to your dashboards.

NLP Topic & Sector Heatmap

The evolution of Sentieo’s NLP Smart Summary^TM sentiment analysis technology, NLP Topic & Sector Heatmap expedites the process of uncovering insights from transcripts by making it easy to quickly understand the sentiment and business drivers for an organization, or across a peer group of companies, over time.

You can add our new NLP Topic & Sector Heatmap into a dashboard, with the ability to navigate quickly between tickers and watchlists using Price Monitor. We have put together a short video on NLP Heatmaps and if you are a customer you can learn more about NLP Heatmaps in the Sentieo Support Center.

IFrame Widget, Tableau Reports

Use the IFrame widget to build your ideal workflow. By combining the power of Sentieo with your favorite third-party tools, you can have all of your key data in one screen without losing productivity to context switching. Tableau is one of the most powerful examples that you can add into your dashboard. Instead of having to leave Sentieo to work through parts of your workflow, you can use IFrame widgets to eliminate the switching cost of moving to another platform.

In this short video, we show how the IFrame widget lets you seamlessly integrate external applications in Sentieo.

RSS Feeds

In our efforts to streamline research workflows and eliminate context switching between multiple applications, we’ve also added a widget to view all subscribed RSS Feeds in a Dashboard. If you are a customer, learn how to add your first RSS feed into Sentieo in the Sentieo Support Center.

New Pre-Built Dashboards

With our most recent release, Sentieo V4.3, we’ve made it even easier to create a new dashboard by reorganizing the Create Dashboard screen and adding new Sector templates.

Dashboard templates are a useful way to tailor the Sentieo experience and to discover your ideal workflow. Whether you care about certain use cases (Documents, Research Management, Financial Data) or particular sectors, these templates can help you find insights faster. 

New dashboard templates for sectors—including energy, technology, REITs, healthcare, consumer, utilities, industrials—help analysts and researchers save time configuring dashboards for at-a-glance tracking of financial data and trends, new documents, news, notes, events, and visualizations.

Here is an example of what a specific sector dashboard, Energy, looks like. One can see the dashboard is pre-populated with sector tickers, relevant charts, relative performance, and trading multiples widgets.

We’ve put together a short video to walk you through a few of these new Sector Templates.

To learn more about how Sentieo’s research workflow platform can help your team be more productive, please get in touch. 

The post Streamline Workflows with Dashboard Support for IFrames, Tableau Reports, and NLP Heatmaps appeared first on Sentieo.

Sentieo’s industry-leading Document Search received a revolutionary update this week with the advent of NLP Heatmaps. This update enables institutional investors and corporate analysts to discover deeper insights about their coverage areas or competitors by categories for an organization, or across a peer group of companies, over time, in a fraction of the time previously required. Analysts can now browse through conversations on many topics from different companies side-by-side, on one screen. 

Sentieo’s NLP Heatmaps categorizes global public company linguistics across 9 categories (e.g., Guidance) and over 130 subcategories (e.g., Revenue) making it easy to conduct comparable linguistic analytics.

NLP Heatmaps allow customers to:

• Review sentiment by Category over time:
  • For example, compare Bloomin’ Brands’ (Nasdaq: BLMN) sentiment regarding its same stores sales in Q12020 compared to Q42019
• Consistently review categorized / similar comments over time:
  • “Combined U.S. comp sales were flat with traffic significantly outperforming the industry” (Q32019)
  • “Combined U.S. comp sales were up 1.9%, with positive comp sales across all concepts.” (Q42019)
  • “Comparable sales at these locations were down 17% from the prior year.” (Q12020)
• Compare Bloomin’s vs Denny’s sentiment and linguistics regarding Same Store Sales in Q12020
• Compare Bloomin’s vs Denny’s sentiment and linguistics regarding pricing over the last 15 years

From one Heatmap, users can clearly compare one company’s sentiment over time, and its sentiment relative to its peers.

To augment your workflow, NLP Heatmaps can be accessed from several locations:

1. Search by ticker without a query
2. Sentieo Smart Summary (located in earnings transcripts)
3. Sentieo Dashboard

The short instructional video below reviews how to access NLP Heatmaps in Document Search or Dashboard and the different ways to use the Heatmap to receive insights.

We are constantly updating our platform with features to help you achieve uncharted insights faster. To learn how NLP Heatmaps can drive more unique and actionable insights for your team, schedule your personalized demo or start your free trial today.

The post Sentieo NLP Heatmaps: Leveraging NLP to Deliver Unique, Actionable Insights appeared first on Sentieo.

We are excited to announce the availability of our latest platform release, Sentieo 4.3!

This release includes powerful new NLP and machine learning-driven features that enable institutional investors and corporate analysts to discover deeper insights about their coverage areas or competitors.

NLP Topic & Sector Heatmap

The evolution of Sentieo’s NLP Smart Summary^TM sentiment analysis technology, NLP Topic & Sector Heatmap expedites the process of uncovering insights from transcripts by making it easy to quickly understand sentiment and business drivers for an organization, or across a peer group of companies, over time.

Sector Dashboards

New dashboard templates for sectors—including energy, technology, REITs, healthcare, consumer, utilities, industrials—help analysts and researchers save time configuring dashboards for at-a-glance tracking of financial data and trends, new documents, news, notes, events, and visualizations.

IFrame, Tableau, RSS Dashboard Widgets

Streamline research workflows and eliminate context switching between multiple applications by embedding RSS feeds and content created in other applications—including Tableau dashboards, widgets, and reports—in Sentieo dashboards using the new IFrame, Tableau, and RSS widgets.

“This latest release brings a new way for equity and corporate analysts to get to performance insights at the sector or peer group level,” said Naman Shah, Co-Founder & President, Sentieo. “Using our leading deep learning models, the new NLP Heatmaps and new dashboard capabilities provide our clients with a shortcut to unique insights on what is driving a sector’s performance and the corporate strategies or business conditions that indicate a company is, or isn’t, keeping up with their peers.”

Login to Sentieo to read the full release notes, contact your Sentieo representative for more details, or subscribe to the Sentieo Blog for more posts on the new release over the next few weeks.

The post Introducing Sentieo 4.3, Delivering Improved Sector Investment and Competitive Strategies With New Machine Learning-Driven Analysis appeared first on Sentieo.