Aftermarket Research: What It Is and Why You Need It

Aftermarket research is any broker/equity research that is not available for real-time consumption. It offers valuable insights into both financial markets and the investment landscape to help guide decisions for leaders in several types of entities, including:

  • Corporations
  • Private equity firms
  • Investment banks
  • Consulting firms

In contrast, real-time market research is available to eligible users (most notably, buy-side investors and investor relations) based on entitlements and is paid for directly by clients to brokers through trading commissions or hard dollar agreements.

Meanwhile, aftermarket research is made available after a 0-15 day delay. It features many of the same documents and insights as real-time research, but follows a secondary market model that eliminates the need for entitlements and makes it accessible to a wider audience.

Aftermarket research is generally used for idea generation, competitive research, monitoring peers, and getting up to speed on industry trends. It is not used for trading ideas. As such, the access delay doesn’t diminish its value to clients.

AlphaSense offers one of the most comprehensive sets of AMR available today, including the exclusive Wall Street Insights® collection for corporate clients, as well as an extremely competitive set of bulge-bracket and mid-tier broker reports for consulting and financial services firms.

In today’s fast-moving and always-evolving business landscapes, AlphaSense offers the invaluable ability to access a wide range of market research reports in one centralized location. At the same time, it offers unmatched AI search capabilities that find and extract insights in seconds, speeding up time to insight and increasing research confidence.

Aftermarket Research for Corporations

While broker research may have once been primarily intended for financial audiences, corporate strategy professionals are increasingly leveraging aftermarket reports to maintain ongoing market and competitive intelligence, monitor market trends, and stay on the pulse of other important macro topics and themes.

Traditionally, corporate strategy research methods required hours spent combing through multiple search engines and other research distribution channels—often only to find that the real insights are hidden behind paywalls. And that’s if a corporate professional is even aware of the value in Wall Street research to begin with. This approach is no longer practical for corporations that want to be competitive in high-speed markets.

AlphaSense’s exclusive Wall Street Insights® library is the only research collection designed and purpose-built for corporate clients, providing unprecedented access to a deep pool of research reports from thousands of expert analysts.

Powered by partnerships with top brokers like Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Cowen, Barclays, HSBC, Bernstein, and Evercore ISI, Wall Street Insights® enables corporate professionals to access the top research available on the market—indexed, searchable, and all in one place.

Aftermarket Research for Investment Banks

For investment banks, aftermarket equity research reports provide critical in-depth insights that inform ongoing M&A and advisory strategies. AMR enables investment bankers to analyze trading patterns, extract investor sentiment, monitor important market trends, and use these collective insights to help clients make better investment decisions.

Ongoing access to aftermarket research on the AlphaSense platform also helps investment banks stay more generally attuned to market dynamics and be first movers on emerging opportunities.

Aftermarket Research for Private Equity

For private equity firms, aftermarket research is an essential part of building smart investment strategies and optimizing portfolio management. 

Aftermarket reports deliver valuable company- and industry-level insights that enable PE firms to analyze key metrics such as operational performance, market size, market share, profitability, growth rate and potential, and competitive position.

Collectively, these insights drive smarter decisions around investment, exit, and growth opportunities while also delivering advantages such as more precise timing and comprehensive risk management.

In the AlphaSense platform, PE firms can level up these capabilities even further with features like automated alerts and customized watchlists that allow them to track targets over time and never miss a critical update.

Aftermarket Research for Consulting

For consulting firms, aftermarket research is a competitive differentiator that enhances the level of expertise they can offer to clients. Armed with sophisticated aftermarket insights, consulting firms can provide clients with more confident, accurate, and data-driven advice that helps them understand their target market, make smarter decisions, and operate more strategically. It also enables them to create stronger, more confident proposals for their clients.

Consulting firms also leverage AMR reports to uncover wider market and industry trends, follow how competitive landscapes are changing, and identify emerging opportunities—all of which can be used to accelerate growth for their own organizations and help clients do the same.

In the AlphaSense platform, consulting firms can access aftermarket research on a range of companies, industries, and global markets, allowing them to widen the scope of their services, develop deeper knowledge and expertise in different specialty areas, and instantly gain insight into new or unfamiliar topics and trends.

AlphaSense Streamlines Aftermarket Research Consumption

With the AlphaSense platform, clients can streamline and optimize their aftermarket research process while maximizing ROI on the reports they access. Research teams can utilize in-platform collaboration tools to enhance data sharing and manage sources with interactive features like table tools integration, notebook, and saved snippets.

Easy export capabilities and the ability to select certain pages to print allow you to pull out the insights you need without being bogged down by long documents.

Most powerfully of all, you’ll have access to all the aftermarket research sources you need in a single platform, all easily searchable and consumable with unmatched AI capabilities such as:

Smart Synonyms™

Smart Synonyms™ is an exclusive AlphaSense feature that recognizes the intent behind every search and delivers results for both the exact search terms and related keywords.

At the same time, this technology recognizes when results aren’t relevant and automatically filters them out, cutting unnecessary noise and eliminating extra hours of research to get you straight to the insights you need.

Automated Monitoring

AlphaSense’s automated alerts and watchlists are highly customizable and give users real-time notifications and alerts to keep them updated on new trends, emerging news, and market and company movements.

Automated alerts remove the manual work required to track companies, trends, and topics in an ongoing way, ensuring you never miss a new update or insight critical to your strategy.

Relevance Rankings

AlphaSense automatically ranks results by their relevance to your research using a number of algorithmic factors, including search term proximity, Smart Synonyms, and document decay. You can be confident that the content sources at the top of your search results page are the ones most aligned with your current research needs.

Smart Alerts

Without a centralized search system, analysts are left to perform multiple manual searches and parse through Google Alerts for the ones with real relevance. On the AlphaSense platform, real-time alerts are customizable and can be set up for a particular company, industry, keyword, or topic (or a set/list of any of the above).

Customized alerts and watchlists give analysts, researchers, and business professionals real-time notifications about important news and updates while also ensuring they aren’t bogged down with alerts that are not in tune with what they really need (i.e. Google Alerts and other public search engine options).

Generative AI

AlphaSense’s generative AI is purpose-built for business professionals, leaning on 10+ years of AI tech development. Our proprietary genAI tool, Smart Summaries, generates insights across all four key perspectives—company documents, news, expert calls, and broker research. 

Sourced from across all broker research you are entitled to, published within the past 90 days, and covers sections including: 

  • Upgrades and downgrades – Covers which brokers have upgraded/downgraded this company within the past 90 days and why 
  • SWOT analysis – Covers the topics/trends identified as strengths/opportunities or threats/weaknesses from across broker reports about this company
  • Competitive landscape – Covers the competitive landscape for this company from across broker reports

Annotate & Bookmark Relevant Content

AlphaSense allows you to directly highlight and take notes on the AMR report you are consuming, and then easily access, download, and share a digest of your annotations anytime, anywhere. This leads to more streamlined and effective workflows and collaboration, which in turn creates a stronger team and better results.