3 Ways to Approach Major Market Impacting Events

At AlphaSense, we have the unique opportunity and privilege to work with clients ranging from the largest institutional investors to the most intelligent 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 significant market impact that affects their businesses, and their lives. 

This perspective and the lessons learned from working with our clients during this time can serve a company during any significant 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 a critical 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 interpret that information, and how they are shifting their business priorities and strategies in light of the pandemic, and what’s been discovered. For example, the chart below shows how the mention of Covid-19 (including all of its variations referenced in documents) has exploded over the prior two years across all content sets. 

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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 outbreak’s potential impact.  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 following year. Even at 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 extensive retail (AMZN, WMT, TGT, COST).

However, these headlines only told part of the story. 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 rely on science’s promise to develop a new vaccine to counteract the disease and slow the outbreak. As a result, markets and investors turned their 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 a result, 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. 

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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 can identify those competitors who are successfully coming out the other side of this dark era and the unfortunate ones who are not.  

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As our clients return to some semblance of normalcy, they continue to closely monitor for the penetration of Covid-19 vaccinations across all markets and track reports of new variants of the disease. The success of each nation’s efforts to vaccinate its 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 affects 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AlphaSense
AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform used by the world’s leading companies and financial institutions. Since 2011, our AI-based technology has helped professionals make smarter business decisions by delivering insights from an extensive universe of public and private content—including company filings, event transcripts, news, trade journals, expert calls, broker reports, and equity research. Our platform is trusted by over 2,000 enterprise customers, including a majority of the S&P 100. Headquartered in New York City, AlphaSense employs over 1,000 people across offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, Germany, and India.

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