If investing is all about making the most of your time, being able to identify the best opportunities and moving to act on choices quickly can support faster, better investment decisions. Here are five ways investors can speed and streamline their research processes this year.
As 2023 gets underway, institutional investors – and other players across the financial sector – must continue to make difficult investing choices in a polycrisis-prone world. Staying abreast of economic news, conducting market analysis and doing deep investor research is still par for the course for finance professionals and institutional investors alike. Today, most investors rely on their own variegated research methodologies comprised of qualitative and historical performance research in addition to fundamental modeling to surface insights to drive strategy and inform decision making.
If investing is all about making the most of your time, being able to identify the best opportunities and moving to act on choices quickly can support faster, better investment decisions. Here are five ways investors can speed and streamline their research processes this year:
With easy access to data, technology solutions can provide a fast runway for investors looking to understand any business opportunity. Compiling, sorting and analyzing information across disparate sources including news, financial findings and analysts reports is time- and resource consuming. By eliminating manual processes through technologies, investors can aggregate critical data then apply their unique human lens without having to execute the gruntwork.
Both the quality and quantity of information matters to investors, as does figuring out how to quickly eliminate massive amounts of low quality data to get to key insights. This task can be lightened by knowing where information comes from and partnering with tech vendors invested in reliable, accurate sources. Being able to pull up an accurate ‘quick look’ summary of a company is a great place to start vetting an idea. From there, quality research involves moving into more mature data from credible sources including industry experts, expert transcript libraries, analysts and competitors in addition to dissecting a company’s current state and future prospecting capabilities.
For those keen to increase investing velocity, a sound network of like-minded investors you trust is an excellent test site to garner insight into potential investments or industry trends. Networks can provide investors with access to experienced professionals who may have valuable perspectives or insight into specific topics or industries. Furthermore, a solid investor stable opens up learning possibilities for new trends, companies and technologies that could present novel investment opportunities. For those in venture capital, Crunchbase and AngelList are two sites that connect investors and offer extensive databases for information to accelerate investing relationships.
With a variety of company valuation models possible, creating a framework to easily map a company or opportunity upon can generate an accurate estimate of value in a short timespan. Considering the economic, market, industry and sector conditions a company operates in, in addition to its financial performance, is the tip of the iceberg for conducting fundamental analysis. However, it can give directional insight into whether an investment thesis is worth pursuing further.
Staying well-organized is essential when conducting investor research as it allows investors to quickly locate pertinent information while accurately tracking, recording and storing data that fuels hypotheses.
Document management systems or digital filing cabinets can be helpful in creating easily searchable systems that can be organized around categories, trends, dates or otherwise.
There is no singular approach to investment research; it will always require time and effort to yield results that generate a deep comprehension of an investment opportunity. However, leveraging innovative platforms like Tegus, which surfaces qualitative and quantitative insights to deliver 360 degree views of companies at speed, is integral to making informed investment decisions at a fraction of the amount of time traditional research takes.
Alleviating the manual search and data aggregation burden for investors, in tandem with focusing on quality information, is a huge part of the equation when it comes to analyzing insights to drive nimble, better investment decisions.
