AlphaSense A Good RMS For Investment Research
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
AlphaSense is used by The Motley Fool's investing team as a research management system. We use the built-in AI to gather insights on conferences, quarterly earnings reports, and material news related to the companies under coverage. We also publish notes in the system to ensure everyone has the latest thinking from covering analysts.
Pros
- AI summaries of earnings reports are helpful at a high level, but be wary of repetitive content.
- AlphaSense handles images and screen captures pretty well, making research notes more useful.
- Isolating content is pretty intuitive. Example: I can enter a ticker, and under the content options I can click for "transcripts only" so that I'm not endlessly scrolling to find the transcript I want.
- Audio is embedded with most transcripts so it's easy to listen and follow along in the text, highlighting what I need for later reference.
Cons
- The AI does a good job of handling one document at a time but often delivers ineffective results if searching for insights over a longer timeframe -- say, a trailing 12 month period.
- There's no mechanism for uploading documents. (To be fair, AlphaSense has added a feature for *defining* the documents to which you want to limit your search, which is an improvement.)
- There should be a mechanism to add comments inside my own notes. (Think about how you can add a comment to a sentence or paragraph in Word or Google Docs. Sometimes contextual notes are helpful.)
Return on Investment
- I don't have a tangible number, but I can say that AlphaSense appears to have been good value as a research management tool. We probably would have spent at least as much as our annual subscription fees to build something a fraction as good.
- AlphaSense AI has also been quite useful in that its highly targeted at a set of financial data that I need. The AI is far from perfect -- especially when evaluating a multi-quarter set of data -- but it tends to at least source data I wouldn't find on my own.
Usability
Other Software Used
Airtable, Notion, Slack
