Why investment firms need better research management solutions

A research management solution should help firms organize, analyze and share the vast amount of research and data needed to make important investment decisions. A good system will enhance an investment manager’s research by centralizing information, fostering collaboration and increasing productivity. But, a research management solution is useful only if it’s used by the entire team.

Why don’t more investment research teams use research management solutions?

An initial barrier to adoption is the pain of migrating all the relevant content into one place. Most research management solutions start as empty containers that require great effort to continuously populate, monitor and update with content from numerous, disparate sources.

And, while it’s important for analysts to have an easy way to search across various external sources, such as corporate filings, broker research, IR presentations and call transcripts, it’s equally important to be able to search across internally produced and stored research.

After all, if the content isn’t searchable, what’s the point in storing it?

What are the risks of not using a research management solution?

• Lack of a centralized way to search or monitor everything – information is fragmented across all kinds of websites, pay-walled databases and data terminals
• Knowledge is kept in silos – research is conducted by analysts individually and stored on multiple systems, including intranets, shared drives, emails, web clippings and their own personal devices
• Analysts spend their time managing data, not making investment decisions

Ideally, portfolio managers should be able to easily share articles and notes with their research team and spark collaboration between analysts.

The objective of investment teams is to find what others miss in order to get an information edge. They need to be able to handle:

• The massive volume of information that needs to be processed and digested by analysts
• The high velocity of new information – research may be outdated the moment it’s completed – and analysts may not even know it because it’s impossible to track everything

A research management solution wish list:

So what’s the ideal solution? One that would allow users to find, monitor, organize and share the vast amount of information needed to make investment decisions from a single place.

The ideal solution would:

• Curate and semantically index the world’s investment and market research content, including the vast high-value content sets that traditional web search engines cannot reach
• Allow users to rapidly search and discover key data points and track impactful new information with intelligent alerts
• Use the latest technology in AI, machine learning and natural language processing to parse through millions of documents in seconds, producing relevant, ranked results viewed from a single screen
• Be available via desktop or mobile, anytime and anywhere it’s needed
• Automatically add synonyms to keyword searches, finding other ways the same concepts are expressed without having to think or know about them while removing false positives
• Offer relevance scoring, allowing users to cut through the noise and find meaningful results
• Allow users to highlight and annotate or tag any content and share with colleagues
• Let users set alerts on saved searches and be the first to hear of new developments
• Save hours of research time daily
• Make it possible for investment teams to amplify their productivity and gain an information edge
• Be a system that investment teams will love to use – because it saves time, finds what others miss and is easy to use

AlphaSense: The next gen research management solution

AlphaSense was custom-built to allow users to find critical information in seconds, and work collaboratively with their teams. Comprehensive content, paired with unique intelligent search, allows AlphaSense users to uncover critical intelligence hidden in millions of data points, fostering smarter investment decisions.

Using a better system can lead to positive ROI and help generate more alpha for asset management firms.