Traditionally, thematic searching has meant sifting through noise in order to surface meaningful insights, but AlphaSense Search Summary changes that.
The feature allows users to succinctly see a ‘search summary’ including companies, industries and geographies relevant to the topic they are searching.
I searched for the keyword “trade war” in order to see how companies talk about the ongoing dispute between the US and China in the past year. I also narrowed my search to transcripts as I am mostly interested in management’s thoughts on the topic rather than what they show in the sometimes too generic filings.
Immediately I can see that Union Pacific, a railway company, is on the top with 17 mentions of the keyword.
A more common guess might be various types of manufacturing companies. These are indeed represented in the top companies and take the first spot in terms of industries.
Unsurprisingly, the US companies are the biggest source of mentions (not only because of the keyword, but also because of the size of the market).
What is relatively surprising is that Hong Kong, which hosts many Chinese-based companies, is nowhere to be seen in the Top 10. In fact, there are only 33 mentions of the keyword in transcripts coming out of Hong Kong. The same holds when one searches for all documents, not only transcripts.
Due to this search summary you are therefore able to again gain a quicker insight into the trend you are looking at and do not have to manually search for the information through multiple sources and software platforms.
Jan Svenda is an independent equity analyst focused on the U.S. Small/Micro-cap space. He searches for long ideas trading around Net Current Assets Value (NCAV) and for short ideas which showcase a significant potential for aggressive or manipulative accounting.
