This month’s release focuses on enhancing integrated features and user experiences as well as improved transparency/accessibility for content on the platform.

New Calendar Functionality

Improving the Sentieo Calendar experience takes a step forward this month to create a more integrated user experience. We’re rolling out several Calendar feature enhancements, including the ability to sync your Google or Outlook calendar events in Sentieo.

Addition of Industry Filter Capabilities for Sector Searches

One of the benefits Sentieo offers users is a multitude of ways to create more targeted search results. To that end, we’ve added an Industry filter layer (GICS Level 3) to our Sector filters to provide greater flexibility for users who view coverage areas through that lens.

If you are a current Sentieo user, log into Sentieo to read the August 2022 release notes. If you’d like to learn more about the Sentieo Platform, contact us today to meet with a solution executive.

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Following the recent Fitch reports integration in Sentieo’s award-winning Document Search module, we sat down with Justin Patrie, CFA, Senior Director, Fitch Ratings, to discuss Fitch’s H2 2022 outlook. 

In this webinar, Mr. Patrie covers both the deteriorating global macroeconomic conditions as well as shares insights from the changes in Fitch’s ratings across sectors and geographies. 

From the macroeconomic perspective, Mr. Patrie discusses what drove the downward revisions for GDP growth across regions in the first six months of 2022. Fitch has also substantially increased the full-cycle rates and inflation forecasts. Further, the downside case scenarios for H2 2022 have increased in probability: from stagflation (high inflation with low growth), to a global recession, to the unknown effects of monetary tightening after decades of declining rates. 

The specific sector outlooks have also been revised. While Fitch takes a “full cycle” view on ratings, extreme exogenous shocks do play a role in the revisions. While most sector outlooks remain neutral, the number of negative sector outlooks increased substantially following the detailed mid-year reviews, and the number of positive sector outlooks decreased. 

On the positive side:

Fitch sees improvements in commodities and certain services, driven, in part, by the still-strong labor markets. But the clouds are gathering for 2023, considering the ongoing tightening. 

Within the more vulnerable sectors, Mr. Patrie highlighted Emerging and Frontier Markets, Unsecured Lending, and Real Estate. 

For example, Eastern European commodity importers are increasingly vulnerable in 2022 due to the confluence of weaker currencies, strong commodities, and proximity to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Unsecured Lending, especially European Asset-Backed Securities, is exposed to declining real incomes and overall economic deceleration. The picture is similar with Real Estate broadly, with interesting sub-sector details shared during the webinar. The vulnerabilities there are driven by the YTD rate increases, especially in countries with issues on affordability and a high mix of floating-rate mortgages. 

During the Q-and-A session, we covered inflation trends including gas supply to the EU and soft commodities, specific sovereigns (including commodity exporters in the Gulf and Latin America), and sovereigns with higher USD external debt exposure. 

Watch the full webinar with Fitch Ratings and browse our other videos on our media channel.

The post Stagflation Risks and Credit Ratings: A Mid-Year Chat with Fitch Ratings (Webinar Recap) appeared first on Sentieo.

Here are the most notable earnings call statements that happened this week!

Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi on Free Cash Flow:

“Uber delivered another strong quarter with gross bookings and an annualized run rate of $116 billion, an all-time high; EBITDA of $364 million, another all-time high and well above our guidance range; and positive free cash flow for the first time ever of $382 million. Despite the uncertain global economic environment and considerable foreign exchange headwinds, we’ve issued Q3 EBITDA guidance that shows strong incremental progression, and we remain confident in our ability to deliver healthy top and bottom line growth, strong margin improvement and yes, free cash flow, all the while continuing to responsibly invest in technical innovation, earner satisfaction and durable long-term growth.”

AMD CEO Lisa Su on the Data Center Business:

“But from our current view, I think we have a strong opportunity to continue to grow the data center business into 2023. And our view is we have an expanding portfolio as well. In addition to Genoa, we have our Bergamo, which is a cloud optimized capability, as well that’s coming online early next year. So there’s a lot of new products that are supporting sort of our growth ambitions.”

“So as we look now into the second half of the year, what we’re seeing is, again, Data Center is strong. Again, we expect Data Center to grow second half to first half nicely.”

Paypal CEO Daniel Schulman on Growth:

“Venmo remains a key growth driver for our business with nearly 90 million active accounts, driving revenue growth in Q2 of more than 50%, with the revenues exceeding $100 million last month alone. We continue to see increased commerce transactions on Venmo with commerce volumes growing more than 250%.”

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz on Customer Demand:

“Customer demand for specifically customized cold coffee beverages, a category Starbucks single-handedly created and is now expanding around the world, is so strong that cold beverages now account for roughly 75% of our total beverage sales in U.S. company-operated stores. Customers are increasingly customizing their cold beverages by adding modifiers that enable the creation of a virtually unlimited range of taste, flavor and color profiles and then sharing their unique cold beverage creations with the world through social media.”

CEO Brian Chesky on the Stock Buyback:

“In fact, we’re so confident in our long-term growth and profitability that today, we’re announcing a $2 billion share repurchase program. And this is coming only 1.5 years after our IPO.”

Block (SQ) CFO Amrtia Ahuja on Afterpay:

“In the second quarter, GMV for Afterpay was $5.3 billion, up 13% year-over-year or 65% on a 3-year CAGR basis. For overall growth trends, we’ve seen impacts from spend shifts from online to in-person, competitive dynamics as well as foreign currency, which slowed year-over-year GMV growth by 5 points. We’ve seen growth hold up better in our more mature regions like Australia, which is more diversified across discretionary and nondiscretionary verticals as well as in-person and online channels.Trends have slowed more in North America, a newer market for Afterpay, where the primary verticals of fashion and beauty are both discretionary retail and where the Afterpay in-person product is still ramping.”

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• Integration of Sustainalytics ESG rating reports (webinar and recap) 
• Integration of ClarityAI ESG ratings (announcement and dashboard) 
• Multiple informational webinars including Impact Investing (open access webinar), UN PRI Implementation for alternative asset managers (webinar), SEC ESG reporting requirements (webinar and recap), using Sentieo for ESG research (webinar), quantitative ESG metrics (webinar)
• Presentations at conferences such as Neudata’s ESG trends (recap)
• Integrating ESG for UN PRI compliance in your Research Management System (guide)
• Multiple pre-built Dashboards for clients including Sustainalytics Dashboard and ESG Topic Monitoring Dashboard, as well as short videos such as Advanced ESG searches utilizing our ESG synonyms   
• ESG white papers/ESG trend books such as 33 Accelerating ESG Trends in Corporate Transcripts 

ESG data generated from the Sentieo platform has been quoted extensively in the media, including: 

• US companies add environmental and social targets to executive bonuses (Financial Times) 
• ESG Metrics Help CFOs Attract New Investors, Reduce Costs (Wall Street Journal)

In our latest Dashboard release, we have focused on ESG controversy monitoring, harnessing the extensive news sources integration, combined with Sentieo’s award-winning AI search, to bring clients a single dashboard that monitors twenty-one different ESG controversies, including:

• Embargoes and sanctions
• Incidents, fires and spills
• Corruption and bribery 
• Monetary fines and settlements
• Tax fraud and tax evasion 
• Product recalls 
• Collusion and antitrust issues 
• Deforestation and soil erosion 
• Animal testing
• Privacy violations 
• And much more, including both established and emerging ESG controversies  

The ESG Controversy Monitoring Dashboard is ready and available for all Sentieo clients and trial users who have the premium news package on the platform. In the three-minute video above, we go over the Dashboard itself, as well as how users can further customize it for their specific needs in seconds. 

The post Monitoring ESG Controversies in a Sentieo Dashboard appeared first on Sentieo.

Here are some top statements from earnings calls this week!

Apple CFO, Luca Maestri on Product Revenue:

“..Revenue was $63.4 billion with a June quarter revenue record for iPhone. During the quarter, our installed base of active devices continue to grow well, thanks to our unmatched levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty and reached an all-time high for all major product categories and geographic segments. Our Services set a June quarter revenue record of $19.6 billion, up 12% over a year ago, with all-time revenue records in the Americas and the rest of Asia Pacific and June quarter records in Europe and Greater China.”

Apple CFO, Luca Maestri on Guidance:

“Overall, we believe our year-over-year revenue growth will accelerate during the September quarter compared to the June quarter despite approximately 600 basis points of negative year-over-year impact from foreign exchange. On the product side, we expect supply constraints to be lower than what we experienced during the June quarter. Specifically related to Services, we expect revenue to grow but decelerate from the June quarter due to macroeconomic factors and foreign exchange.”

Amazon CFO, Brian Olsavsky on Inflation:

“Inflationary pressures remained at elevated levels in Q2, similar to what we saw in Q1. These include pressures from higher fuel, trucking, air and ocean shipping rates, which we expect will continue into Q3. We made strides to improve fulfillment network productivity in Q2. Staffing levels were more in line with rising Q2 demand, and we saw better optimization of our fulfillment network. On the transportation side, we continue to improve delivery, route density and improve package deliveries per hour. We are encouraged by the progress during the quarter and see opportunity to further improve in the second half of the year.”

Amazon CFO, Brian Olsavsky on AWS:

“On the bridge to Q2 to Q3, so again, you have the — mentioned 3 items, ops improvement that we see of $1.5 billion and offsetting that is increased costs in AWS as we build out depreciation. We also are adding — continuing to add people in that space, product engineers, sales people, customer support. Speaking more broadly, we know AWS is a huge opportunity. It’s early days in the adoption curve for companies and governments. And we invest with that confidence in mind. And customers have responded and we’re going to keep investing there.”

General Motors CEO, Mary Barra on Demand:

“Our #1 goal right now is to get these battery plants up and get it launched because there is such strong demand for the products that we have, whether it’s the HUMMER or the LYRIQ and continuing — we’re seeing really good interest in the Bolt from a customer perspective. But as we get into next year with the Silverado EV, the Blazer EV, the Equinox EV and yet this year later, the SUV of the HUMMER, we’re busy getting everything ramped up. And then if one thing General Motors’ engineering team and manufacturing team knows how to do is take cost out, and we’ll do it.”

Alphabet CFO, Ruth Porat on Advertising:

“Network advertising revenues of $8.3 billion, were up 9%, driven by AdSense. The quarter-on-quarter deceleration in both YouTube and network advertising revenues primarily reflects pullbacks in spend by some advertisers.”

Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai on Cloud:

“Customers are choosing Google Cloud as their technology partner because of our leadership in 4 areas. First, we continue to lead in the data cloud market because we unify data lakes, data warehouses, data governance and advanced machine learning into a single platform that can analyze data across any cloud.”

Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg on the Metaverse:

“By helping to develop these platforms, we’re going to have the freedom to build these experiences the way that we and the overall industry believe will be best rather than being limited by the constraints that competitors place on us and on our community and on small businesses. And given some of the product and business constraints that we face now, I feel even more strongly now that developing these platforms will unlock hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions over time. This is obviously a very expensive undertaking over the next several years. But as the metaverse becomes more important in every part of how we live from our social platforms and entertainment to work and education and commerce, I’m confident that we’re going to be glad that we played an important role in building this.”

Mastercard CEO, Michael Meibach on Consumer Spending:

“In the U.S., what you are seeing is good strength across both, but a declining trend in terms of the growth rates on the lower income side of things. Affluent spend continues to be very healthy and carries on in a very nice way. Outside of the U.S., we’re not seeing much in the nature of a shift between now. the affluent category spending versus what the lower income category spending.”

McDonalds CFO, Kevin Ozan on Inflation:

“For the full year in the U.S., we expect roughly 12% to 14% inflation. It’s a little higher than that in the second quarter. likely a little higher than that in the third quarter. And then we expect to see it to moderate some in the fourth quarter. Obviously, that’s based on what we know today. that’s on food and paper. On the labor side, we’re probably seeing a little over 10% labor inflation right now. Part of that is we had strategic wage rate increases in our company-operated restaurants kind of mid last year. So we won’t start lapping those until the second half of the year. So more of that inflation was hit in the first half of the year than the second.”

Start finding material insights with our Intelligent Transcript Analysis. Our NLP Smart Summary leverages natural language processing, machine learning, and sentiment analysis to standardize the review of earnings call transcripts.

Sentieo, an AlphaSense company, provides the first financial intelligence platform specifically designed for the research needs of investors. Sentieo’s AI-powered financial search engine aggregates internal and external content into a single shared workspace for a more efficient research process. Over 1,100 global customers use Sentieo to surface, visualize, and share the insights that give them an edge.

The content of posts reference an opinion and / or is presented for product demonstration purposes. It is provided for information purposes only. It does not constitute, nor is it intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

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1. Three levels of synonyms

• Synonyms/acronyms ON  

• OFF but keep stemming (i.e. gerunds, possessives, plurals) 

• “Exact match” 

You would have missed 36 out of 44 relevant results on the most recent DAL call with Ctrl-F!

2. Read multiple documents on one screen with Snippets view.

3. Search for number types, like currency, percentage, volume, or dosage, with or without keywords.

4. Control the distance between your query words: keep them as close or as far as needed.

5. Save your searches and have them come to you as alerts, or on your Dashboards.

6. Compare what management or members of management are saying, versus what the analysis are asking about with Speaker Search.

7. Sort by Relevance or by Hits for recent, but higher “density”, documents.

8. Add multiple document types in the query box with the IN: shortcut as you go.

9. Search titles across corporate, research, regulatory, and news documents for specific issues of importance.

10. Combine multiple tickers and watchlists for your searches: here we are picking up news and filings for our US Airlines watchlist members.

11. You don’t even have to search: enter a ticker and go to that company’s Documents Homepage, where all important corporate documents are lined up, while all recent news, research reports, and more are on the left. 

12. Do you have internal content? Make it searchable, too, with our integrations with many popular internal doc tools, or through direct manual or automatic uploads.

13. Use ! to exclude a company from the results. For example, !AAPL !MSFT will exclude AAPL and MSFT documents. Use it to gauge product adoption by other companies! 

14. Like a section or a document? Highlight with a topic, or bookmark, write a comment, tag a coworker!  It is all saved and searchable in our integrated Research Management System.

15. Searchable investor presentations? Of course! Select Presentations or just use the IN:PPT shortcut.
Here we are searching MDLZ for Oreo.

16. Search sell side reports by bank: select specific banks, or use IN:RR: for a list of banks in the shortcuts, like IN:RR:GS for reports from GS or IN:RR:MS for reports from MS.

To learn more about how you can do this in our platform, and liberate yourself from CTRL-F watch our basic and advanced Document Search webinars. You can also check out our full video library.

The post 16 Tips on How to Search Better with Sentieo’s award-winning AI-Powered Search! appeared first on Sentieo.

Throughout 2022, we’ve been working to expand our fixed-income research sources. This month’s release continues that journey with exciting news about a new content partner on the platform.

Expanding Credit Research with S&P

We are thrilled to enter into a new partnership with S&P Credit Research. We are now able to provide their leading Credit Markets research reports to our mutual user base. Coverage areas include credit, regional and sector insights, and macroeconomic themes.  

If you are a current Sentieo user and want to learn more about our new partnership with S&P or additional new features launching in July, log into Sentieo to read the July 2022 release notes. To learn more about the Sentieo Platform, contact us today to meet with a solution executive.

The post July 2022 Release Highlights appeared first on Sentieo.

1. Call audio with controls like 2x, fast forward, and more

2. NLP word clouds: See the major topics at a glance

3. NLP transcript heatmaps: See sentiment and snippets by topic

4. NLP trending topics: See accelerating topics by company and by sector, and click to read these specific segments

5. Transcript sentiment toggle: See positive and negative sentences as you read

6. Transcript navigation by topic: Focus on important issues regardless of where they are on the call

7. Manage the transcripts “firehose”: See all transcripts coming in, or filter by region, market cap, sector, and more

8. Earnings Calendar widget shows a monthly view of upcoming reporting dates

9. For in-depth earnings prep, our ‘Earnings Portal’ is great to see estimated trends, prior reactions, and a lot more

To learn more about how we performed our analysis and created the charts in Sentieo, watch our basic and advanced data visualization webinars and read this data visualization guide. You can also check out our full video library.

The post Earnings Season Tips appeared first on Sentieo.

1. VIX Index: We have entered a high-volatility market regime

2. Credit spreads are shooting up

3. Mortgage rates have increased considerably in the last 6-12 months, affecting several sectors (showing US 30-year fixed rate mortgage)

4. US consumer sentiment is extremely poor

5. Inflation (and transcripts with mentions of inflation) are at very high levels

6. All broad equity indices are down double-digits YTD: SPY, EFA, EEM, QQQ

7. Unusual, given the move in equities, fixed income is down across instruments: AGG, LQD, HYG, SRLN and more

8. Within the US equity sectors, XLE trounces all YTD

9. “High-duration” sectors like $XBI Biotechs, FINX Fintech, SPAK SPACs have done much worse than the broad indices YTD

10. SaaS valuations (looking at the average CLOU holding EV/NTM Sales) have been cut in half YTD

11. Within energy, AMLP midstream has done worse versus the large-caps XLE, services OIH and E&P XOP

12. 183 US-listed Biotechs trade at negative enterprise value, in contrast to just 13 a year ago (XBI)

13. The crypto winter is here, with large declines for Bitcoin and crypto-related equities

14. Searches for stagflation, recession, and inflation have been moving up considerably

15. May 2022 had the second highest number of call transcripts mentioning “recession” in recent year, after May 2020

16. Perhaps some green shoots regarding inflation, current estimates for the revenues of the fertilizer companies point to 2022 being the high point, as we can see with the MOS revenue estimates by year

17. Similarly, the trend in XOM’s revenue estimates could indicate longer-term moderation in commodity prices

To learn more about how we performed our analysis and created the charts in Sentieo, watch our basic and advanced data visualization webinars and read this data visualization guide.

The post Mid-Year Review in Charts 2022 appeared first on Sentieo.

This month’s release is reflective of one of life’s important facts: context matters. To help provide greater context for you in your research process, we’ve added audio replay functionality to call transcripts.

Transcript Audio Files Now Available

It’s not surprising that transcripts are one of our most used content sources on the Sentieo platform. They offer great value by providing you a direct line into the thinking of management.

One thing written transcripts can often lack: context such as tone. To help solve that issue, we’ve now added audio files for the conversations that underlie the transcript. This provide a more robust perspective on transcript discussions.

If you are a current Sentieo user and want to learn more about accessing transcript audio, log into Sentieo to read the June 2022 release notes. If you’d like to learn more about the Sentieo Platform, contact us today to meet with a solution executive.

The post June 2022 Release Highlights appeared first on Sentieo.

This post was authored by Clarity AI, a leading sustainability data science and technology company and a Sentieo partner.

The recent move by the Securities and Exchange Commission to require disclosures of climate-related risks, including greenhouse gas emissions, is a positive step towards a more sustainable world. The announcement by the world’s largest economy came years after their European counterparts. The draft rule will disclose companies’ direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions, otherwise known as Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. In a somewhat surprising but reassuring move, the proposal also indicates that firms will need to disclose, eventually, greenhouse gas emissions generated by suppliers and partners, known as Scope 3.

“At Clarity AI, we believe there is no pathway to net zero without fully incorporating Scope 3 emissions into regulation and reporting standards. And even then, regulation will only take us so far. Technology allows investors to access robust and transparent Scope 3 emission data at scale, which will be critical to check the reliability of the reported data and to start to understand the key drivers of those emissions. Deep granularity and full transparency will be needed for investors to manage their paths to decarbonization, while also keeping companies “on track” to meet the Paris targets,” our Head of Product Research and Innovation, Patricia Pina, said. To gain a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities surrounding Scope 3, Clarity AI has published a recent article on the topic, Why Have Scope 3 emissions data has become essential. 

Although the SEC regulation looks like a promising step there are a lot of details to iron out in the coming months and years. While we wait for additional details, it may be helpful to look to our neighbors across the pond to see where they encountered challenges on their sustainability journey.

The EU has dealt with a variety of challenges in implementing their various regulations; a couple include:

• Establishing clear definitions – Many of the EU regulations included content that was ambiguous and open to interpretation which could lead to different implementations of the regulation.
• Providing realistic timelines – The implementation timelines for SFDR and EU Taxonomy have been incredibly tight and due to the lack of internal resources, teams have struggled to meet the deadlines, causing overall delays in the process.

Regardless of regulatory challenges, the EU and UK are making progress. This all comes with a backdrop of rising demand for ESG investment products, so much so that it is becoming table stakes to have ESG offerings available.

The increased demand for ESG products has also increased the need for ESG-related resources. The demand is being seen across a variety of stakeholders, from in-house ESG teams to IR officers, to ESG consultants and many more. To meet these needs Sentieo has responded with ESG-specific dashboards and synonym groups, as well as integrating content and data with providers like Clarity AI. To further assist clients, Sentieo published a recent guide, 33 Accelerating ESG Trends, outlining ESG themes in proxy statements that are highlighted both at the broad and granular levels. 

Rising demand for ESG products and increasing regulatory initiatives are all a signal that sustainability interest is here to stay. If the volume of Google searches is any indication of interest, searches for Scope 3 recently hit a near all-time high. Now it’s a waiting game to see what comes next on the United States’ sustainability journey. 

Worldwide Google Trends: “Scope 3” Searches – 5-years Ending 4/9/2022.

The post The U.S. is Playing Catch Up on the Risk of ESG appeared first on Sentieo.

We don’t envy the challenges investment management firms face daily. 

Complex regulatory requirements. Data-intensive business models. Competitors introducing disruptive technologies. Legacy system incompatibility and sprawl. It’s enough to cause stressful days and sleepless nights for leaders tasked with driving innovation and solutions around these issues.

Many cloud-based technologies provide frameworks that allow innovation leaders, CIO’s, research directors, and portfolio managers to scale solutions for their business needs more effectively and efficiently than on-premise (“on-prem”) solutions can offer. But even with clear-cut advantages provided by cloud solutions, concerns can arise regarding security, uptime/operational resiliency, and how cloud technologies map to regulatory guidelines.

These tradeoffs need to be evaluated by a firm based on their operating model, with evaluations taking into account both off-the-shelf and bespoke software options (no wonder that the global software consulting has become a $200 billion industry!)¹

Unlocking the Power of Investment Research with Cloud Technology

Investment management companies know that the core driver for their firms’ performance is their investment research: sound research drives new investment ideas. When done well, research can help firms capture that elusive alpha. 

As a result, when narrowing our focus to evaluate most investment managers’ research management processes, the value a cloud-based approach can provide starts to emerge. Leveraging the power of cloud computing as part of a research management system (RMS) can: 

• Drive significant workflow efficiency improvements across research and investment teams
• Create a centralized, standardized platform for collaboration, regardless of team member locations
• Provide real-time visibility into investment theses for key internal stakeholders (eg, portfolio managers)
• Deliver a single, secure source of truth to guard IP and streamline compliance reporting preparation

In the evaluation process, we don’t want to downplay the importance of addressing any concerns that may result from a move to the cloud vs legacy on-prem strategies. When assessing RMS vendors who’ve transitioned to the cloud, due diligence should include understanding a vendor’s:

• Data protection and access controls, both while in transit and at rest
• Standards for high availability, especially for global organizations
• Information security and infrastructure designed around risk management best-practices
• Compliance with global security standards

Takeaways

Your research team likely developed an organic approach to getting their work done; we’ve seen it with many companies. But more often than not, these approaches have either relied on clunky internal systems or are patchworked across multiple, disjointed software programs that provide limited visibility across teams.

Cloud-based RMS technologies have emerged that can help with creating more efficient workflows, improved collaboration, and better visibility of research outputs for organizations. These tools can be an important, high-impact step in an investment manager’s digital transformation journey. Take time to do your due diligence and find your best fit, and you can unlock more of your research team’s valuable insights.

1. https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/report/software-consulting-global-market-report

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