How to Conduct Asset Management Market Research

In today’s ever-shifting market environment, having the right resources and tools to conduct market research is critical for asset managers. Market research allows you to find the insights and information you need to drive investment recommendations and portfolio positioning—while safeguarding you from missing out on lucrative opportunities. 

With the dawn of AI, investment teams are gaining efficiencies and the ability to streamline their workflows. AI is transforming research tasks and due diligence that were once manual, repetitive, and time-consuming efforts. 

The evolution of AI has enabled teams to focus on larger-picture objectives, and pivot strategically on data-driven insights. The ability to act swiftly and make confident decisions is critical for maintaining a competitive edge and delivering on performance. 

With AI in asset management growing at a projected rate of 34% CAGR into 2027, the implementation of this technology will continue to play a vital role in improving portfolio management, optimizing performance returns, mitigating risk, and ultimately delivering better outcomes for investors.

Below, we outline best practices for performing market research, the various types of research workflows, and the benefits of leveraging an AI-driven workflow for optimized results and quicker insights.

What is Asset Management Market Research?

Asset management market research is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information relevant to the asset management industry. This type of research helps stakeholders understand market dynamics, trends, opportunities, and challenges. 

Typically, asset management market research involves market analysis, competitive landscape analysis, industry trend analysis, and risk assessment. 

Pinpointing valuable insights is the backbone of market research within asset management. Whether a researcher is keen on a particular industry, a trending theme, or a specific company, locating the right information is key in order to pressure-test a hypothesis, conduct due diligence, or to secure a deal. It is the basis for driving informed investment decisions and uncovering potential areas of opportunity.

Across asset classes, investment teams consult a myriad of sources to gain critical insights on both public and private companies. They seek out both qualitative insights and quantitative data, to provide a holistic snapshot into a company, industry, or trend that may be relevant to formulating a hypothesis or affirming convictions.

Data-driven quantitative research provides a glimpse into the performance, condition, and financial health of a firm. Often sourced from earnings transcripts, broker research, and company filings, it can steer portfolio positioning and/or re-balancing, or materially impact M&A outcomes.

Qualitative insights—such as company documents, expert perspectives, and regulatory filings— uncover non-numeric data insights and explore subjective aspects including attitudes, behaviors, motivations, and commentary. Qualitative data is powerful as it adds necessary context to quantitative data, analyzing text data points that quantitative methods cannot measure. This helps researchers gain a more complete perspective on any industry, company, or topic.

A comprehensive investment research workflow will incorporate elements of both primary and secondary research and capture both quantitative and qualitative insights to get a complete picture of the market.

How to Conduct Asset Management Market Research

In an era of information overload, getting up to speed on an industry or company quickly, ensuring the accuracy of insights, and streamlining research findings is of paramount importance. The ability to confidently ascertain intelligence empowers firms to strategically pivot and make informed, data-driven decisions.

That’s why investment teams are turning to AI and generative AI (genAI) capabilities to enhance knowledge discovery and deliver efficiencies to their workflows. Leveraging emerging technology and developing best practices ensures firms stay at the forefront and maintain a competitive advantage.

AI platforms like AlphaSense help you conduct better, more efficient market research in the asset management space by supporting the following key workflows: 

Utilize In-Depth Financial Analysis

With AlphaSense’s cutting-edge AI technology, investment teams can streamline financial analysis and pinpoint critical data points in seconds: 

• Access Extensive Financial Information – Search a company’s ticker and run thematic searches across broker research and expert transcripts to quickly validate assumptions.
• Performing Time Series Data Modeling – Filter by SEC filings to access income statements, balance sheets, and more, and then drill down to see and export QoQ data for trend analysis.
• Extract Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – Filter by earnings calls and see KPIs highlighted in the panel. Click “Show History” to expand your view to all snippets related to that KPI over time.
• Streamline financial auditing and workflow – Our Table Explorer feature allows you to generate a historical lookback of a company’s financial performance (broken out quarterly or annually), quickly spot seasonality, and further understand growth trajectory.

Uncover Instant Insights with Summarization

The ability to surface insights instantly saves investment teams the considerable time it would take to review lengthy documents such as earning reports, broker research, and expert perspectives to extract valuable information. With genAI summarization functionality, researchers can simply search for a particular company or industry and surface tidbits of information most relevant to their research. 

AlphaSense’s Smart Summaries is a generative AI tool that draws from our premium content universe and provides an analysis of the positives, negatives, outlook, and Q&A from earnings transcripts—all verifiable with a single click. Beyond just a company’s self-reported results and outlook, you also get summaries of analyst reactions post-earnings call. This enables you to capture the full picture of bullish or bearish reactions, and make recommendations to position your portfolio accordingly.

Identify Emerging Trends and Pinpoint Disruptors 

To stay informed on trends actively shaping the industry, analysts have traditionally aggregated intelligence from multiple sources and have run the risk of missing critical insights elsewhere—until now.

In addition to structured data, genAI is streamlining how teams can consume and leverage unstructured data. This includes news articles, company documents, presentations, and other qualitative sources that are ordinarily time-consuming to scour. Additionally, image searches have the ability to extract data from charts, tables, and images that would be missed by a regular search.

The AlphaSense platform uses genAI to centralize the information you need in order to execute top-down and bottom-up searches with ease. Our simple thematic searches enable you to map the market, identify segment-specific drivers, and discover new companies not on your radar. Identifying emerging trends and pinpointing disruptors in the market has never been easier. With AlphaSense’s exclusive and premium content library spanning 10,000+ public and private data sources, you can ensure no stone goes unturned.

Discover 360 Degree Expert Perspectives 

AlphaSense has evolved the way researchers access expert perspectives with an extensive expert transcript library and Expert Call Services. Our personalized expert calls can complete your investment research process and maximize your return on investment (ROI) by streamlining your connection to experts and quality insights.

Leveraging Expert Insights allows you to fast-track your understanding of an industry or market and gain a competitive edge with informed decision-making. Additionally, granular insights from custom expert calls allow you to extract the exact information needed to validate your investment process from firsthand industry perspectives that are closest to the “source of truth.”

Unlock the Value of Proprietary Research

AlphaSense’s Enterprise Intelligence solution unlocks the value of your firm’s prized internal knowledge using generative AI. 

Our purpose-built AI searches, summarizes, and interrogates your proprietary internal data alongside a vast repository of 300M+ premium external documents to surface the most valuable insights. It allows you to automatically integrate and tag your PDFs, SharePoint documents, CIMs, Excel sheets, and more. You can also interrogate long documents with natural-language chat that go straight to the source to surface the most relevant insights. 

With our Enterprise Intelligence solution, investment teams can instantly surface proprietary market knowledge while removing any unknowns, potential blind spots, and reputational risk.

Keep A Pulse on Market Movement with Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis plays a critical role in structuring the investment recommendations that are passed on to portfolio managers as part of the research process. Analysts rely on a plethora of buy-side and sell-side research, company documents, expert perspectives, regulatory filings, and more to craft their findings and share vetted reports with the broader investment team.

As a machine learning and natural language processing (NLP)-based feature, sentiment analysis sifts through many of the documents analysts rely on, extrapolating tone and language nuance to provide the subtext within seconds. This feature is built into the AlphaSense platform, enabling you to quickly recognize the positive, negative, or neutral sentiment in the source you are analyzing. 

Sentiment scoring on the AlphaSense platform can potentially spot stock movement before it happens, and also gain a deeper understanding of a pivotal market event or trend. Overall, it is a crucial component of the market research process that drives better, more informed investment decisions.

Benefits of Asset Management Market Research

By facilitating the insights and knowledge that are essential for decision-making, market research undoubtedly serves a critical role in investment recommendations and positioning. It can ultimately affect the outcome of a deal, influence portfolio performance as a result of rebalancing and/or re-positioning, and help you identify lucrative opportunities.

Leveraging AI and genAI throughout the discovery process ensures best practices for conducting research, by streamlining the intelligence and insights investment teams need to act with confidence and with the speed of the market.

The ability to confidently ascertain intelligence empowers firms to strategically pivot and make informed, data-driven decisions. Leveraging emerging technology and exercising best practices ensures firms stay at the forefront and maintain a competitive advantage.

Beyond creating efficiencies and accelerating the speed of insights, AI-driven market research also minimizes manual tasks that may have yielded insights with limited or inaccurate visibility, potentially resulting in inferior investment guidance, or worse—reputational risk. 

Having the ability to proactively monitor macroeconomic conditions, get end-to-end research coverage, instantly analyze expert perspectives, and track early signals for market-moving trends is a hallmark of generative AI’s vast capabilities, and one that ultimately fosters alpha generation. 

Get Ahead with AlphaSense

A successful investment strategy starts with swift, accurate insights. AlphaSense’s powerful AI platform eliminates the unknowns of locating crucial market intelligence by quickly parsing through an extensive content universe of expert transcripts, broker research, financial documents, and more to pinpoint quality insights and metrics in seconds. 

Learn how our industry-leading AI platform can help you sift through the noise, accelerate your research, and bring efficiencies to your workflow, resulting in confident, data-driven decisions.

Let our powerful AI capabilities do the heavy lifting so you can competitively position your team—start your free trial of AlphaSense today.