4 Critical Content Sets For Navigating Economic Uncertainty

Amidst a host of macroeconomic factors—the Russian-Ukrainian War, inflation, and supply chain shortages, to name a few—business leaders are facing a multitude of difficult decisions and unique challenges. 

In this uncertain time, earnings targets are frequently not being met, layoffs are almost a matter of course, and companies are forced to do more with less to keep meeting their bottom line. Yet if history is any indication, the companies that were able to not just survive but thrive in past recessions were not the ones that succumbed to the status quo. 

Instead, they were the innovators who chose to take risks and pivot their strategy to meet the changing demands of a changing economy. They also prioritized understanding the market landscape from all possible angles and getting different perspectives on macro themes and events, before simply reacting to uncontrollable external circumstances. 

In today’s age of information—when there is no shortage of data and the real challenge becomes separating the critical signals from the irrelevant noise—how can companies and investors find the information that truly helps them make smart decisions and keep turning profit?

The secret lies in combining the right content sets with an AI-based research tool that helps parse, connect, and analyze the various disparate sources of information. Furthermore, the best organizations continuously evolve to free their knowledge workers from the confines of repetitive, low-value research. This is especially true during moments of economic uncertainty, where time is an increasingly precious resource and getting to the truth is more critical than ever. 

Combine Content with AI

AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform that stands out from all the rest, both due to its extensive universe of content and its advanced AI search technology. 

AlphaSense provides access to 10,000+ premium sources of private, public, and proprietary business information all in one place—combining the four key perspectives for effective market research. Then, its powerful patented AI search technology works to uncover and extract the most relevant and impactful insights from that content. When you solely rely on CTRL+F to parse through multiple tabs of documents, you’re unable to successfully filter through the noise.  AlphaSense allows you to easily track the evolution of trends and information over a period of time to give you a better understanding of what to expect in the future.

Companies that are able to consistently outperform the market and gain an edge over their competitors are those who:

• Have access to all relevant perspectives they need in one place, so they never have to risk making the wrong decision due to research blind spots
• Embrace advanced technology to create new improved workflows, speed up time to insights, and do more with less

In this post, we will go over the key content sets and perspectives that you need to navigate economic uncertainty, as well as provide examples of how AI helps you get even more out of that content set. 

Related Reading: The Evolution of AI: Trends to Watch in 2023

Content Sets You Need to Navigate Economic Uncertainty

While each of the individual content sets outlined below offers tremendous benefit and insights to any researcher, investor, or corporate professional, the true value comes from having them indexed, searchable, and all in one place. This allows you to quickly gain a full 360 view of the market landscape and eliminate blind spots in your research, thus avoiding poor, uninformed, and often costly decisions.

Here are the four main content sets every professional needs to look at when navigating economic uncertainty:

Company Documents

Company documents include SEC and global filings, earnings transcripts, ESG reports, press releases, company presentations, events transcripts, and more. They are valuable because they provide first-hand information about specific companies, directly from the source. 

The following are some of the most useful company documents when navigating economic uncertainty: 

Earnings Transcripts

Earnings transcripts are one of the most crucial sources of information in times of economic uncertainty because they tell you everything you need to know about the performance of your competitors or the companies you are interested in, on a quarter on quarter basis. 

However, if you are simply skimming through pages and pages of earnings transcripts, you are likely missing key details and nuances in the commentary. AlphaSense algorithms automatically aggregate and group relevant themes and KPIs from the transcripts, and then analyze these themes quarter-over-quarter. With Company Topics and sentiment analysis, you get a high-level understanding of the topics a company is discussing most frequently, whether mentions have a positive or negative sentiment, and how those themes are evolving over time. Sentiment analysis can read between the lines in nuanced ways that humans often cannot do on their own. 

Related Reading: How to Prepare for Earnings Season With Artificial Intelligence

SEC Filings

Company filings offer the most detailed and objective view into a company’s financial standing. They often include information that is not found in corporate press releases or earnings transcripts, and investors can use filings from institutional investors to generate future investment ideas. AlphaSense aggregates all of these filings from thousands of companies in one place, making it easy to perform seamless due diligence and faster research.

Thought Leadership

These documents come from consulting firms and include insights into industry trends, expert perspectives, market outlooks, forecasts, and other market analyses. AlphaSense provides access to insights, commentaries, surveys, and market research published by 70+ firms including McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, PwC, EY, and more.

Thought leadership has the power to give you clarity on market-moving trends likely to affect the companies and industries of interest to you.

Broker Research

Broker research, also known as equity research or industry analyst research, has always been a pinnacle of investor and hedge fund manager workflows, helping them stay on top of the ever-evolving investment landscape. 

These days, cutting-edge corporations also utilize broker research and reports to understand analysts’ expectations on market trends and industry and peer performance. This content set can be particularly useful during times of uncertainty because analysts are often the first to produce outlooks on emerging economic trends, opportunities, or challenges. Broker research is not readily available to just anyone—it requires special access, which means companies that have access tend to have a leg up over their peers. 

AlphaSense’s premium broker research offering, Wall Street Insights®, is the only collection available for the corporate market that includes all leading global banks, including Goldman Sachs, Citi, Bank of America, and Bernstein Research. That, paired with AlphaSense’s Smart Search technology, allows you to easily parse through thousands of reports and glean crucial insights in a fraction of the time.

News & Trade Journals

News insights are valuable because they reflect public sentiment—both from industry players and the general public—around a particular event, trend, or company. While broker reports allow you to go granular on a topic, it’s equally important to step back and see the larger picture. News and trade journals allow you to track how the wider world is reacting to events, topics, and news, as well as updates from government agencies.

Journalists offer one of the most current and up-to-date sources of information—allowing you to keep up with the fast-changing and fast-moving narratives of market events in real time. Yet relying on the same few top news outlets for all your information is risky, as you may miss pivotal updates reported on by other outlets. 

A particularly striking example of this is the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. In just two days, a major bank that had been operating for nearly 40 years ceased to exist, and the repercussions of this event were felt across industries and companies. By setting up alerts for all “Silicon Valley Bank” mentions, AlphaSense clients were able to track the progression of the downfall in real time and get insights from all news outlets discussing the bank. This, in turn, reduced knowledge gaps and time spent on information gathering. 

With AlphaSense, you get aggregated access to top-tier news sources and trade journals from every major industry, and with customizable alerts, you will never miss a pertinent news report about the topics or companies you care about again.

Expert Transcripts

While most corporate professionals only utilize secondary research in their market intelligence process, investors have long known the unique value of primary research. For anyone conducting market research, primary research—such as expert calls—offers the kind of first-hand experiential knowledge that is critical for developing a holistic view of any market, industry, or trend. 

Stream by AlphaSense provides access to over 28,000 expert call transcripts in our extensive expert transcript library. These proprietary expert calls provide you with exclusive expert perspectives on potential investment and growth opportunities during periods of market volatility. Experts can help professionals understand how certain trends could impact their companies, how their peers are being affected, and how historical events can be used to predict the outcomes of current macroeconomic hurdles.

During periods of economic uncertainty, time is of the essence, and our expert transcript library helps increase the speed and efficiency of your research with AI-driven search features. Call summary, table of contents, and audio timestamps are just a few of the functionalities that enable you to discover the most critical insights in seconds. 

Sentiment analysis, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) feature, parses out the tone and language nuance in call transcripts and calculates a sentiment score, according to how positive or negative the sentiment is. 

We add thousands of new transcripts monthly, which means you always get fresh insights from our custom recruited experts. The most reliable methods of information sharing rely on compliance, and Stream in AlphaSense adheres to a strict process, created by our Chief Compliance Officer (CCO), to guarantee content you can trust. 

Discover the Power of AlphaSense

AlphaSense is the only market intelligence platform that elevates your ability to locate critical information on macro themes, industries, and private and public companies, with our extensive content universe and AI technology. Our AI search engine was built for business decisions, allowing you to pull out relevant insights and streamline your research process.

Economic uncertainty necessitates agility and adaptability. With fewer employees and more risk in the market, you need a tool that helps you answer questions faster and with more confidence. Improve your decision making and help your business thrive with limited resources—no matter if it’s a bull or bear market. Sign up for your free trial today.