April 2021 | AlphaSense

3 ways to approach major market impacting events

Posted on April 30, 2021April 30, 2021 by Craig Farrell

At AlphaSense, we have the unique opportunity and privilege to work with clients ranging from the largest institutional investors to the smartest management consulting firms to the world’s most innovative corporations. By helping these clients get the most out of AlphaSense during one of the most uncertain times in modern history, we’ve gained a unique perspective on how different clients identify, monitor, and respond to new information making a major market impacting that affects their businesses, and their lives.

This perspective, as well as the lessons learned from working with our clients during this time, can serve a company during any major market event, even if it’s not a crisis as impactful as the pandemic. By holistically understanding how our clients approached their research during such an important time, you can leverage a similar strategy to find the insights you’re looking for.

As we consider the evolution of our collective understanding of COVID-19, much has changed in terms of the amount of information available on the virus, how clients are interpreting that information, and how they are shifting their business priorities and strategies in light of the pandemic and what’s been discovered. The chart below shows how the mention of Covid-19 (including all of its variations referenced in documents) has exploded over the prior 2 years across all content sets.

Thematic landscape analysis

With such a dramatic and world-altering event such as the pandemic, the first step required simply trying to understand COVID-19. What was it? How was it impacting local, national, and global governments? And how were companies and industries being affected? From a document perspective, we saw a rapid increase of pandemic, coronavirus, and COVID-19-related coverage in the News and Broker Research analyst reports.

Clients were grappling with identifying the risk, monitoring the spread of the virus, and beginning to project the potential impact of the outbreak. By the end of Q1 and into Q2 of 2020, we saw COVID-19 enter the corporate discourse, commanding significant attention in earnings calls and being discussed heavily by management teams at conferences. As the world went into lockdown, COVID-19 was the dominant news story and continued to be throughout the next year. Even at the time of this writing, the pandemic continues to fuel endless discussions, conversations, and analysis as we begin to ponder what the world, markets, and industries may look like post-pandemic.

Evaluating the market impact

As the impact of Covid-19 was being measured and quantified across all industry segments and businesses by Wall Street, new broker research reports were coming out daily in an attempt to measure the overall impact of the pandemic, identify the industries that would be hurt most, and find which companies and sectors were most poised for growth. That growth segment included those who were PPE and ventilator suppliers (MMM, LDL, RMD, MDT), facilitators of life in our new normal (NFLX, ZM, DIS), the housing industry (LEN, DHI, HD, LOW), and big retail (AMZN, WMT, TGT, COST).

However, these headlines only told part of the story, and in order to truly understand the implications of the pandemic, more comprehensive research was required to find new insights and opportunities that weren’t immediately obvious. This included:

Understanding the market impact of a remote workforce and what a “return to the office” looks like

Finding insights and trends among the 150+ companies who filed for bankruptcy during the crisis

How impacts from the oil industry may shake up Russia-Saudi Arabia relations

Monitoring new developments

As governments, citizens, and companies rallied against the constraints brought on by the pandemic, it was clear that living in a lockdown was not the permanent goal. Different countries had various strategies and reactions to the change in cases, deaths, and hospitalizations but they all considered that a vaccine was the world’s best bet against the virus.

Enter the US government’s funding of Operation Warp Speed and relying on the promise of science to develop a new vaccine to counteract the disease and to slow the outbreak. Markets and investors turned eyes to the pharma and biotech sectors and their R&D machines. These companies quickly became the new focus, as intense scrutiny was placed on the various clinical assets companies were moving through the clinical trial process. As the chart below displays, the number of new industry-sponsored clinical trials rapidly expanded, led by the names that are dominating the vaccine dialogue even to this day.

Fast forward to today, we are now assisting our clients and helping them track vaccination progress in their markets of interest and ongoing business recovery efforts across their sectors. By leveraging sentiment analysis and looking at QoQ changes, clients are able to identify those competitors who are successfully coming out the other side of this dark era, and the unfortunate ones who are not.

As our clients return to some semblance of normalcy, they are continuing to closely monitor for the penetration of Covid-19 vaccinations across all markets, as well as to track reports of new variants of the disease. The success of each nation’s efforts to vaccinate their citizens and workforce will have repercussions across all markets and industries. It will inform the pace of recovery, including how travel and tourism will return, which impacts air travel, which impacts fuel prices, which impacts economic activity and output, and so on.

This is why we created a Covid Intelligence Tracker that gives you direct access to how companies are discussing the pandemic, in real-time.

For the pandemic and beyond, AlphaSense continues to be a critical information source for managing these unique and challenging times.

To learn more about the AlphaSense platform and its recent upgrades, check out our AlphaSense X webcast. This on-demand video will show you how we’re leveraging AI across the search experience to help you find the relevant information you need, faster.

How markets are responding to India’s sudden COVID-19 spike

Posted on April 28, 2021July 27, 2021 by AlphaSense Staff

While headlines are leaning positive given the vaccine rollout in countries like the US, Israel, and the UK, not every country has had the privilege as the pandemic continues to affect dozens of nations. India, for example, has experienced a sudden spike in coronavirus cases, demonstrating the speed at which a virus can wreak havoc on a country and their medical resources.

The crisis has led to an oxygen shortage– hospitals are at capacity, and they’re strained to treat those with COVID-19 infections. HFDC Bank, in India, recently announced that they have converted three of its training centers into isolation facilities. Even the US, other countries, and the private sector have pledged resources and assistance in hopes of remedying the situation as quickly as possible in a country with a population of over 1.3B people. However, the impact, timing, and how soon we’ll see beneficial results are yet to be determined and there will be global ramifications given how severe the crisis is in India. On AlphaSense, we found over 15K documents over the last 30 days (as of 4/27/21) mentioning India and COVID-19 (search link available here for AlphaSense users), and the volume is increasing. In the previous 15 days, there has been a 35% increase in documents with pharmaceutical, metals & mining, banks, and oil, gas, & consumable fuels being the most discussed industries.

How companies are reacting to India’s rise in coronavirus cases

Below, we’ve found several key transcripts and company documents that shine a light on how companies and industries have started to feel an impact given the pandemic’s relentless comeback.

Freudenberg Group | Press Release – Outlook | Document Link

For 2021, Freudenberg once again expects a generally challenging overall economic environment. Following a significant downturn in the world economy in 2020, especially because of the spread of COVID-19, economic growth is expected to recover in 2021.

Despite the challenges of working in India, German companies are still very convinced of the long-term Indian opportunity, with its young well educated and connected population and its evolution as an IT and R&D powerhouse for global players. “India is the youngest-connect-democracy” in the world and is increasingly being considered a preferred partner in manufacturing across industries with companies realizing that India is more than a consumption market but is also a manufacturing and R&D hub that allows foreign companies to create and export products to other markets in this region.

While Ease of Doing Business, transparency and e-governance has shown considerable improvement, skills development and technical training needs further investment. However, it will probably take a few years to reach the pre-crisis level. The geopolitical and economic uncertainties faced in 2021 are especially severe. One major uncertainty is the further development of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the global economy and on the markets of the Freudenberg Group, especially in the automotive industry.

EBIX | Annual Report | Document Link

Our revenue from our gift card business grew significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic and may not continue at that level after the lockdowns are lifted as the risks of the pandemic decrease.

During 2020, our revenue from the payment solutions offerings in India (primarily prepaid gift cards), increased by more than $200 million year over year to approximately $256 million, a 590% year-over-year growth. The increased demand for prepaid gift cards in India was primarily due to: (i) COVID-19, which has facilitated increased online and electronic commerce due to restrictive lockdowns in 2020; (ii) changes in regulations by the Reserve Bank of India related to debit cards, which has shifted demand in the market towards prepaid gift cards; and (iii) the Company’s increased marketing efforts around the prepaid gift card business. There can be no assurance that this level of revenue will continue once the lockdowns are lifted and economies begin to open back up from the effects of COVID-19 or if there are new regulations adopted that impact the use of gift cards or debit cards.

RAMCO Systems LTD | Annual Report | Document Link

Estimation of the future impact of COVID-19 on its operations

The lockdown scenario the world over has put tremendous pressure on the global business activities, including ours. Prospects are thinking twice on committing new business, which would have impact on order booking and revenue. Travel restrictions, including international travel, have created hardships by way of inability to meet the prospects for new business, the existing customers for delivery of the projects etc.

In order to mitigate the impact, the company has been taking various cost reduction measures. However, the estimation of the future impact of COVID-19 could not be predicted and quantified at this juncture, as we still continue to bear the brunt of the outbreak.

Opera LTD | Press Release – Q1 Financial Results | Document Link

…In particular, Nanobank’s location in India has seen process impacts of the local COVID-19 resurgence affecting both Nanobank staff and its external audit team, resulting in significant delays in completing all required processes.

United Breweries Ltd | Annual Report | Document Link

The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in India had caused significant disturbance and slowdown of economic activities. The business operations of the Company have also been significantly impacted by way of interruption of production, supply chain, etc. Recently, there has been a surge in the spread of COVID-19 in India and various state governments have imposed restrictions ranging from night/weekend curfew including closure of malls, restaurants and other public places to contain the spread of COVID-19.

BIC (Societe) | Interim Report | Document Link

“While we continue to effectively navigate through a challenging trading environment, we remain cautious for the balance of the year due to uncertainties related to the pandemic, particularly in Latin America and India. With our Horizon plan serving as our North Star, I am encouraged by the direction that we are taking and the capabilities we are building throughout our organization that will drive accelerated profitable growth.” – Gonzalve Bich, Chief Executive Officer

The Stationery category continued to be strongly affected by ongoing school and office closures and evolving consumer shopping habits. Latin America, Africa and India, with traditional trade highly impacted by the pandemic remained the hardest hit

Sibelco | Financial Report 2020 | Document Link

We saw a sharp drop in sales to the steel market as the pandemic led to the idling of blast furnaces throughout Europe and to a lesser extent India.

Tile manufacturing was badly hit by COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in Italy, Spain and India, resulting in us losing the equivalent of one month’s worth of sales in each country. Sales in engineered stone also fell as producers significantly reduced stock from March onward.

How to support

With more than 110 team members in Pune and Mumbai, AlphaSense has also been affected by this tragedy. Our hearts go out to our India team, their families, and the entire community affected by this aggressive resurgence. Given the urgent crisis and its direct impact on our team members in India, AlphaSense has contributed $5,000 to the Oxygen for India program with the intention to help purchase 20 oxygen cylinders. We encourage those who can contribute to do so as well.

AlphaSense wins “Best Financial Research and Data Company” two years in a row

Posted on April 20, 2021April 20, 2021 by Adam Felsenthal

AlphaSense is honored to announce that we were named “Best Financial Research and Data Company” for the second straight year by the FinTech Breakthrough Awards. Receiving this award two years in a row is a testament to our commitment making AlphaSense the best AI-powered financial and market intelligence platform for our more than 1,500 clients.

With more than 3,850 entries from companies across the world, AlphaSense was selected following FinTech Breakthrough’s analysis of our groundbreaking search technology. As James Johnson, managing director at FinTech Breakthrough puts it, the AlphaSense platform allows users “to make data-driven decisions rapidly and accurately with access to thousands of premium business data sources – indexed, searchable, and all in one place.”

Our platform was recognized for leveraging AI and NLP technology within the search experience, suggesting content types, measuring sentiment analysis within multiple documents, surfacing key topics and themes from companies, and using AI to capture all variations of business and financial terms to ensure no key insight is missing. Our vast amount of sources, which has significantly grown in the past year, also played a role in winning this award. Since last winning the award, we’ve added major macroeconomic and federal content from the IMF, the USDA, the Office of Financial Research, the FBI, and the DoD among others, as well as major updates to our Life Sciences sources by adding content from clinicaltrials.gov as well as other departments such as the CDC, WHO, the NIH, and the US Department of Health and Human Services. This is in addition to our already robust collection of financial filings, earnings call and event transcripts, company documents, broker research, news, and trade journals in seconds, further bolstering the comprehensiveness of the depth of research and insights that can be gleaned from AlphaSense.

We’re especially proud that our work in the last year has been noted and recognized. “Since being recognized with the FinTech Breakthrough Awards in 2020, we’ve introduced a variety of new features including KPI and theme extraction technology, enhanced collaboration functionality, significantly increased the amount of new content available in the platform, and continued investing heavily in our industry-leading AI & NLP technology, resulting in major updates to the platform, such as KPI and Theme Extraction, Company Topics, and Smart Content recommendations,” said Kiva Kolstein, CRO & President of AlphaSense. “Being recognized again by FinTech Breakthrough is an incredible honor and we are proud to once again receive this industry recognition.”

FinTech Breakthrough is an independent market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global FinTech market today, and their awards program is a premier recognizer of FinTech innovators, leaders and visionaries from around the world.

We are proud to power thousands of the world’s leading organizations, including 37% of the S&P 500 and 70% of the top 50 hedge funds, who use AlphaSense to rapidly surface the critical information they need on companies, industries, and market-moving trends.

If you’d like to see the power of AlphaSense for yourself, sign up for a free trial to quickly surface industry-specific insights across 100M+ documents, including earnings calls, company commentary, broker research, and more.

Welcome to the new way to search, AlphaSense X

Posted on April 16, 2021April 19, 2021 by Chris Ackerson

Never has there been so much pressure to find critical insights, and leverage them to inform business or investment decisions. Whether you are focused on companies, or themes, the need to quickly discover insights is paramount.

This challenge continues to increase as more and more data is published on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis across disparate sources, making it more difficult to comb through the information. This also creates an issue of confidence – how can you be sure you went through every relevant source and aren’t missing any key pieces of information?

To address these challenges and empower our users’ search capabilities, AlphaSense will be making a series of upgrades to our platform, called AlphaSense X. These enhancements will leverage AI as a proactive force within the platform, making the discovery of critical insights faster and easier than ever before.

We released the first AlphaSense X upgrade earlier in Q1 with Company Topics, which provides a visual breakdown of the topics a company is discussing so you don’t need to search to know what’s impacting their business.

Now, we are introducing a new search experience.

We launched this new experience as a Beta feature in Q4 2020, and we are ready to release it to the public after collecting and incorporating hundreds of user feedback notes.

The New AlphaSense Search Experience

To arrive at this new search experience, the AlphaSense team took a step back and thought about the purpose of a search platform and settled on two key themes: 1) time; and 2) results.

Saving Users Search Time

With search time in their crosshairs, the team analyzed over 3.5 million examples of user search flows looking for parts of the search process that could be eliminated, reduced, or refined in order to save time. With the team’s analysis and user feedback, we identified two main areas for improvement:

Content shortcuts: We observed that specific content sources were utilized in greater volume than others depending on the type of search. As a result, the new search experience includes ever-present content shortcuts designed to reduce the amount of clicks a given search takes.
Document previews: Users were often clicking through several documents in the search results to identify the best fit for what they were looking for. As a result, we now provide document previews so users can quickly identify if a document serves their need without clicking through.

Leveraging AI to improve navigation

The team analyzed over 8 million read events that followed successful searches, looking for patterns between search parameters and documents read.

They found some key trends and, with plenty of user feedback, have introduced two key upgrades to the AlphaSense platform:

AI suggested content filters: Our AI technology now takes the search parameters users entered and suggests additional content filters to help narrow down searches for better, more specific results. This means different suggestions will be shown based on what the user is trying to find.
Automatic result sorting: Results are now sorted based on the users search parameters to make sure sorting is optimized for the best results, and that users are exposed to the most relevant documents.

Using AlphaSense for an optimal search experience

How can you use the new search? We’ve identified several use cases where this new search will enhance the user experience:

- If you are new to AlphaSense OR are researching a company or theme for the first time. Having our AI technology make content suggestions will help you quickly understand how to best narrow your search, and make the task of finding the ideal document and critical insights easier and faster.
- If you are in exploratory mode OR researching a new topic around a company or theme. In this scenario, two of these new features will serve you best. First, our AI technology will make content suggestions based on your exact keywords, helping you uncover additional, relevant content types for your search, so you can find new insights and ideas.

If you are searching for a more obscure company or topic. With the company proximity filter you can expand your search to ‘All Mentions.’ When searching a company and keywords, AlphaSense will return all primary documents that contain your keyword but also any document that contains your keyword in proximity to a mention of your company ensuring that you don’t miss any key insights.

If you have internal docs automatically syncing, take notes, annotate, and bookmark. AlphaSense is only as powerful as the content available to search within. For users who have internal docs integrated and syncing and/or have notes stored in the system, the quick content filter for ‘Integrations/Notes’ allows instant filtering to these sources only. And you can use the My Content filter to quickly filter to ‘only mine’ which are all integrations, notes, annotated or bookmarked documents that match your search criteria

We’re excited to see how you can make the most of this new search experience. If you’d like to know more about AlphaSense X, check out our AlphaSenseX webinar here. If you’ve never used AlphaSense before, we’d like to invite you to a free two-week trial so you can experience our powerful search platform for yourself. Sign up for your trial here.

Cryptocurrency, blockchain, and NFTs: The impact on finance

Posted on April 14, 2021August 25, 2021 by AlphaSense Staff

Several years ago, the discussion around blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum was whether these technological novelties were merely a fad or if they were here to stay. Now, with cryptocurrencies having reached a $2 trillion dollar market capitalization, the question isn’t whether these cryptocurrencies will have any longevity, it’s how much of an impact they will have on consumer banking and the financial industry as a whole.

New technical innovations, like NFTs, have emerged and are now raising similar questions as digital artists, the NBA, and hundreds of brands seek to take advantage of this new crypto-trend. But how will these new financial and technological innovations be used by banking institutions and will they have the same mainstream adoption we see on the consumer side?

We used AlphaSense to learn how the finance industry is approaching cryptocurrencies.

Company discussion around cryptocurrency and infrastructure

While cryptocurrency is bound to be a popular discussion among the financial industry, we wanted to be more specific and discover whether the industry thought it could make an impact within banking and financial systems.

In a 6 month period leading up to April 5th, we found over 152 total company documents within the financial industry that mentioned “cryptocurrency” and “infrastructure”, a 96% increase over the last 90 days. (AlphaSense users, here’s a saved search link)

Drilling even deeper, we found an 184% increase in company docs over the last 90 Days across Banks, Insurance, and Consumer Finance companies that contained those terms.

Within those documents, and across documents that mentioned “blockchain” and “infrastructure” we found some noteworthy events where major private and public institutions across the globe were making moves towards incorporating cryptocurrency or blockchain technology among their service offerings or leveraging them as a complement to what they were already providing as a service. Here are some examples.

JSE Limited, one of South Africa’s largest financial institutions, entered into a commercial arrangement with Globacap Technology to “establish a blockchain-enabled private placements platform to enable the raising of infrastructure finance and to allow small-to-medium sized issuers to raise capital in South Africa.”
Silvergate Capital, an infrastructure and service provider for the digital currency industry, recently announced that Fidelity Digital Assets would serve as the custodian of SEN Leverage, Silvergate’s bitcoin-collateralized U.S. dollar loans, marking a major partnership between a cryptocurrency infrastructure provider and a major U.S. financial institution.
Sino Global Shipping American Ltd, a shipping and freight logistics provider, announced that they would acquire a 60% ownership of the blockchain infrastructure developer Super Node LLC in an all stock transaction valued at $5 million, highlighting how blockchain technology isn’t just for the finance industry.
TAAL, an enterprise blockchain infrastructure and service provider, recently went public in Canada, with an impressive $40M IPO debut.
The European Commission published a digital finance package including a set of proposals that, according to EuroNext’s Universal Registration Document, “would create a bespoke regime for crypto- tokens that are not considered as financial instruments, create a pilot regime for market infrastructures that use distributed ledger technology, and amend existing legislation to frame crypto-tokens that act as financial instruments to be defined as such.”

Raiffeisen Bank’s Annual Reports Statement also points to this package as well as new business models and financial products as paving a way for further digitalization in the financial sector and new strategies for retail payment services.

Organizations across and beyond the banking and finance industry are leveraging cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in their own ways. And the opportunity only seems to be growing. Murray Stahl, Chairman and CEO of FRMO Corp, an investment holding company, had the following to say in a Q2 2021 Earnings Call.

“…this was a quarter where everything was working in our favor. I expect that as the infrastructure builds out, for cryptocurrency, that it’s going to be a wonderful experience for many, many years….”

NFTs emerge as the new cryptocurrency kid on the block

NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which are built on blockchain technology (most commonly, Ethereum’s blockchain tech), have exploded in popularity over the last few months . NFTs can be used to commodify everything from digital art, music, and even moments in sport. They represent a new form of ownership for anything that can live in the digital world and there has been a lot of chatter within the AlphaSense platform.

We saw a huge increase in the mentions of NFTs across Company Docs, Transcripts and News and across research as well, with 90-day increases hitting over 220%.

Across these documents, companies were either announcing their own NFT release, finding their foothold within the NFT space, or, as you’ll see with one example, looking for business opportunities given the potential of NFTs. Here are a few key transcripts.

Monex Group, Inc, Q3 2021 Earnings Call | AlphaSense Transcript

“…But in [the] non-fungible token [space]… there is no one who won the #1 position in the world. And to create a platform for non-fungible — marketplace for non-fungible token, the technologies and the expertise are pretty much the same as running the crypto exchange. So Coincheck is…trying to take the big position in the world in the NFT marketplace. So this is quite interesting…”

Wizard Entertainment | Annual Report | AlphaSense Transcript

“We see an opportunity in the Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) industry…In recent months many companies have entered this space. However, Wizard Brands, Inc., because of its existing enterprises, is perhaps uniquely situated to enter the NFT marketplace on a scale at which no other new market entrant into this space can achieve. Although the NFT market is currently gaining considerable attention in the press, and is achieving traction with consumers, it is impossible to know the ultimate size and significance of the NFT marketplace.”

Mudrick Capital Acquisition Corporation | 8K Filing | AlphaSense Document Link

Mudrick Capital is a SPAC and has recently announced that it is looking to take the popular collectibles company TOPPS public, citing, among other things, its potential in the NFT market. One of the key reasons TOPPS is being considered is due to “Significant growth in its industry-leading e-commerce and digital (apps) platforms positions Topps to further expand with Blockchain/NFT (Non-Fungible Token) initiatives.”

Lastly, we recommend checking out Galaxy Digital’s Q4 2020 Earnings Call. In it, Mike Novogratz, Founder, CEO, & Chairman of Galaxy Digital, offers crucial insights and commentary around the current NFT craze and what he thinks the opportunity will look like moving forward.

Digital Currency: How CBDC may displace cryptocurrency

There is another digital currency that may make a huge impact on the banking industry across the private and public sector. Central Bank Digital Currency (or CBDC) is similar to other crypto currencies with one major difference. Rather than traditional crypto currencies relying on decentralized technology, CBDC (also known as e-cash) is, by definition, centralized, which may foster adoption among more traditional financial institutions.

There’s even a potential that CBDC actually displaces cryptocurrency adoption among governments and major banking organizations. To learn more about cryptocurrency, CBDC, e-cash, and what the near future looks like for these new financial innovations, check out our AIR Summit webcast. Howard Mason, a Financial Analyst at Renaissance Macro, will discuss the opportunities CBDC will provide to the private and public bank sector and the major differences between CBDC and crypto currency.

CBDC and the Future of Monetary Policy [Webcast]

Posted on April 13, 2021July 27, 2021 by AlphaSense Staff

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum seem to be all the rage, making headlines left and right. But there’s another kind of digital currency, Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC, which may have an even bigger impact on the banking and payment industry. CBDCs are similar to cryptocurrencies but are, by definition, centralized, a significant distinction. This is why some have speculated that governments as well as major financial institutions, are more likely to adopt CBDCs in favor of cryptocurrencies.

China recently moved forward with its plan to roll out its own central bank digital currency. The pilot program is now in its second phase and allows users to control transactions from a digital wallet using their mobile devices. This has also raised questions as to whether or not the US should issue its own digital currency and what the pros and cons are of taking such an action.

CBDCs have the potential to dramatically shift how traditional payment and banking systems work and may displace cryptocurrencies in institutional adoption. Even though there has been an increasing acceptance of bitcoin and NFTs (built on blockchain technology), financial and government adoption hasn’t come close. CBDCs, however, may buck that trend as governments and financial institutions look for opportunities to take advantage of digital currencies.

To learn more about how CBDCs will impact the banking and financial industry, sign up for our live webcast featuring Howard Mason, Financial Analyst at Renaissance Macro. You’ll learn the difference between cryptocurrencies and CBDCs, how private and public can leverage CBDCs and eCash, and how this new digital currency can transform the payment industry in the near future.

The webcast will go live on April 21st at 11 AM EDT | 3 PM GMT.

Secure your spot here.

AlphaSense Awarded Multiple G2 Distinctions Including #1 in Financial Research, Leader in Market Intelligence

Posted on April 8, 2021July 27, 2021 by AlphaSense Staff

We’re proud to announce that G2, a software review site, has awarded us several distinguished awards across multiple categories for the Spring 2021 season. In the Financial Research category, we were awarded a Leader distinction and are the #1 rated platform. Across the Market Intelligence, Market Intelligence Enterprise, and Media Monitoring categories, we were also distinguished as Leaders.

These awards are based off over 60 user reviews from IR directors, financial research analysts, chief investment officers, corporate strategists, competitive intelligence managers (and more) across enterprise and mid-market companies in various industries. We’re not only the #1 platform in the Financial Research category (our second time in a row garnering that distinction), we’re also the only company within that category to hold the Leader distinction within G2’s analysis that evaluated our profile based on the quality of our reviews, NPS scores, growth, among other factors to rate our Satisfaction and Market Presence scores.

Why we’re #1

From user reviews across industries such as healthcare, finance, tech, manufacturing, one thing is clear – they love us. Over 90% of our reviews are 5-star, (the rest? 4 stars) and our reviews point to how users save a significant amount of time using AlphaSense’s excellent search capabilities, live platform support, wide breadth of content, and useful features allowing them to export data, tables, charts, and any other information necessary.

Most importantly, our AI technology provides content and source recommendations, an overview of key topics specific companies are discussing, theme summarization, sentiment analysis, and Smart Synonyms, which captures all the variations of a single search term in business and financial language so your search is as accurate and comprehensive as possible. These essential features allow our users to surface important insights in a fraction of the time it would normally take them.

What our users say about AlphaSense

Here are some excerpts from our most recent reviews. To read all our reviews, check out our G2 profile here.

“Simply the best tool for the Investor Relations and Corporate Research professional”

Matthew A
Founder & President
Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

“Incredible depth of research over a vast amount of companies, with impressive coverage that’s customizable to the user. The user can set up alerts, enabling tracking targets and competitors, delivered to my email instantly. The platform can be accessed online, regardless of device, and the mobile app is quite useful.”

“Essential Tool for Market Insights”

Zack T
Director – Strategic Communications – Cisco Contact Center BU
Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

“[Search] by keyword, sentiment analysis tools, ongoing updates, access to [a] wide range of topics, including transcripts and IR reports.”

“Great for competitive analysis”

Stephen F
Financial Analyst
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)

“…The user design is intuitive, the search options allow for customization (boolean search, intelligent search). The results are highlighted for ease of review…“

“Really great platform – 10/10 would recommend!”

Simran D
Analyst
Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

“…AlphaSense really lets you use targeted words and searches to best find the information you need. My favourite feature of the platform is perhaps how it will only show you sources that have your two words 10-15 words apart. This lets you get rid of all the noise that you get on traditional platforms like Google, and helps you focus on a single source better.”

“Best Text Search Algorithm in Equity Research Space”

Ricky M
Consultant, Surgical Innovations Strategy
Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

“My top three

Best Text Search: AlphaSense’s search[es] deep into documents, even embedded tables…
Broadest Company Universe: Reach to many OUS countries – including Japan – have really impressed me vs. previous platforms I used.
Delivery on promises – when I joined AlphaSense 8 months ago they said they would expand entitlements with more investment banks’ sell side research teams and they have – bringing over some of the strongest teams like BAML…”

“Alphasense is a one stop shop for all my external perception needs.”

Sanjeev D
Executive Director, Corporate Strategy
Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

“…All top analysts are included within my subscription which really helps me get to the right insights in near real time.”

“Amazing smart search tool!”

Maksat S
Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

“All sell-side and independent research in one place and AlphaSense’s smart search and synonyms makes it very easy and fast to research any company/sector/topic. Bookmarks, tagging, notes and sharing take it to another level…”

“Nothing short of life saving”

Chase F
Analyst
Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

“Keyword search is remarkable – not only is it accurate, but it is smart enough to pick up words or phrases that are peripheral to the word you searched…”

“The Ultimate Time Saving Machine”

Antoine L
Equity Research Associate
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)

“Combines The Best Of Multiple Platforms – And Always Improving”

Alex R.
Senior Research Associate
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)

AlphaSense powers thousands of the world’s leading organizations, including more than 50% of the S&P 100 and over 66% of the 50 largest global investment firms, who use AlphaSense to rapidly surface the critical information they need on companies, industries, and market-moving trends. We thank our users and are proud that we’ve been able to impact their most critical strategic decisions.

To see the power of AlphaSense for yourself, sign up for a free trial to surface industry-specific insights across 100M+ documents, including earnings calls, financial filings, trade journals, broker research, and more.

The winners and losers emerging from the Suez Canal crisis

Posted on April 6, 2021July 27, 2021 by AlphaSense Staff

For nearly a week, the Suez Canal, a major pathway among the world’s shipping routes, was blocked by a major container ship, the Ever Given. Despite the short-lived block, there were immediate after-effects and the long-term ramifications are still yet to be seen, though we have found a few key indications.

The Suez Canal is one of the most trafficked ports and to literally get around the block, companies were forced to re-route, take detours or opt for alternative shipping methods, causing delays and potentially losing any perishable products that were sitting in a freight container. While a blockage is extremely rare, the incident has forced scrutiny on the supply chain risk companies face, which may impact future strategies.

We took a look at some key players who had interesting insights and outcomes from the Suez Canal Crisis. In our research within the AlphaSense platform, we found a 566% increase across company docs and research mentioning the “Suez Canal” or “Suez Crisis” over the last 45 days (AlphaSense users, click here for a saved search link for the platform.)

The fallout from The Suez Canal: Who’s affected?

The losers

Insights and outlooks across multiple research and analyst reports pointed out that the most affected by the Suez Canal crisis would be industries reliant on container shipping, Panamax, and Supramax bulkers. This includes manufacturing plants and would affect European imports, resulting in items (such as toilet paper and coffee) being out of stock or having elevated prices.

In the U.S., some imports and retailers may be affected if there’s a measurable impact on container availability and, as you’ll see below, fashion retailers will also experience delays due to the Suez Canal crisis.

The winners

Many of the research documents we found pointed to a clear winner: the shipping industry. Freight, air freight, and container shipping companies are likely to benefit from this crisis due to rising shipping rates and because companies opted for different shipping routes, re-directions and alternate methods.

If you want access to real-time and after-market equity and broker research to inform your corporate strategy, check out AlphaSense’s Wall Street Insights, the only equity research offering built for the corporate market.

Key transcript statements around the Suez Canal crisis

Even after the block was removed, we have seen some companies specifically reference whether and how this crisis will impact them. Here are some key examples.

Flexible Solutions International, Inc | SEC 8-K Filing | AlphaSense Transcript

“Shipping and Inventory: Ocean shipping and land transport in the US are taking much longer than usual. 6 weeks from PO to receipt of product has become 3 months in some cases. The Suez Canal problem will exacerbate this for a few weeks. We are doing our best to cope with shipping issues by ordering far ahead but we warn that some disruption will be unavoidable.”

NEXT plc | 2021 Earnings Call | AlphaSense Transcript

“…we had around 2.5% of our stock that has been delayed as a result of the Suez crisis. So it’s an irritation, but it is not a major impediment to trade going forward. And we’re not expecting any impact on sales from that problem in the Suez Canal.”

Guess, Inc | Q4 2021 Earnings Call | AlphaSense Transcript

“We believe that the port congestion delays, including the recent event in the Suez Canal, will be normalized by the summer, and we have made provisions to anticipate the receipt of goods wherever possible to mitigate further delays.”

PVH Corporation | Annual Report (SEC 10K filing) | AlphaSense Transcript

“In addition, the shipping disruption occurring as a result of the temporary blockage of the Suez Canal…may also result in delays which impact our business, although currently such impact is expected to be minimal. We continue to monitor these delays and other potential disruptions in our supply chain and will implement mitigation plans if needed.”

Oxford Industries Inc | Annual Report (SEC 10K filing) | AlphaSense Transcript

“We have also experienced increases in freight costs and distribution and logistics functions as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors and may continue to see such cost pressures, including as a result of the recent blockage of freight through the Suez Canal.”

The outlook for the future

Fortunately, many of the worst-case scenarios were avoided because the blockage only lasted a week. But it doesn’t mean companies won’t be feeling the after-effects of this disruption beyond Q1 and Q2 of this year. Along with the pandemic’s long-lasting effects, this may lead companies to take another look at their supply-chain and see what they can do to reduce the risk of a problem like this from happening again.

To get even more insights on the global market and how the pandemic recovery looks like, check out our Expert Briefing Series featuring Torsten Slok, Chief Economist at Deutsche Bank Securities.