AI for Asset Management: An equity analyst improves efficiency by 25% every quarter

One of the joys of building a startup is working with customers at a level of depth and closeness to truly understand their challenges. Then, you get to bring all of your creativity and resourcefulness in developing a new solution.

In this series of posts, we’ll walk through some of our actual customer use cases, to show how firms and individuals use Thematic to solve for their investment research and product development needs.

So here’s the first Thematic Use Case: the buy-side equity analyst.

The challenge

Our customer is a buy-side equity research analyst at a large asset management firm. She works on a team of analysts, covering the healthcare sector, and reports into a Portfolio Manager. She has roughly 30 companies to cover. Each quarter at earnings season there’s a rush to digest the latest information from each of her companies, understand the trends and market forces that impact the industry, and develop defensible opinions. With resources and budget becoming more constrained, the amount of data to be consumed increasing, and demanding questions from her PM, this analyst came to Thematic looking for help.

Solutions

First, our customer needs to track her coverage area - as a group, as smaller subcategories, and as individual companies. She needs to compare against industry benchmarks. On Thematic, she creates several portfolios, which are easy to compare against each other and benchmarks.

Every quarter’s earnings season, our customer needs to very quickly digest the latest information on each company. Thematic helps her ask questions about the latest quarterly filings and earnings calls to quickly find the most important information. Thematic also helps her understand industry trends, key issues, and risks. Ultimately our customer needs to build a valuation model and make a buy or sell recommendation to her PM, and Thematic helps her understand the “why” behind the numbers so that she can defend her recommendations.

Any time a major announcement comes in, our customer needs to digest that information and answer questions from her PM. For example, it was recently announced that behavioral health sciences are receiving additional funding from the federal government, with funding administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS). With only a few hours to digest this new information, our customer turns to Thematic to understand the impact of this announcement and which companies are likely to benefit the most.

Conclusions

Overall, our customer estimates that working with Thematic saves her 25% of time every earnings season. We’re working with her on additional customizations, such as quarterly automation, now that we have a better sense of what she needs every quarter.

Give Thematic a spin, for free! Our AI-powered research platform, Analyst, is optimized to help you kick start your research project, or go deep on individual companies. If you’re looking to build portfolios or indices for tracking and benchmarking purposes, check out Builder.

As always, we welcome any feedback that you have for us!