AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform used by companies and financial institutions. Since 2011, their AI-based technology has helped professionals make business decisions by delivering insights from public and private content—including company filings, event transcripts, news, trade journals, and equity research. The platform boasts users among 4,000 enterprise customers. Headquartered in New York City, AlphaSense employs over 1,000 people across offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, and…
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Tegus
Score 9.9 out of 10
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Tegus is a company intelligence platform for key decision makers, supporting institutional investors, corporations, and consultancies through their database of primary and market information. Tegus is a research platform that streamlines access to public financials while helping users understand customer perspectives, competitive landscapes, core business challenges and the drivers behind company data.
AlphaSense is very well suited to investing teams that need a research management system that has a robust database behind and rich content management features for note-taking. AlphaSense may not be well-suited to individual investors who want data access but don't need to be sharing notes to a wider team. The sharing features are what make AlphaSense most useful.
Tegus is very well suited for equity analysts (buy or sell-side) that are looking to get a better understanding of the business fundamentals for a company under coverage. I am a generalist, so I have a good understanding of what the financials of a company. Using my analysis, I can form a general investment thesis. However, being a generalist, I generally lack a good understanding of the nuances of a given company/industry. Therefore, I have used Tegus to locate experts to help me identify where the financial analysis may be different at a given company because of a specific nuance to the company and/or industry in which it operates. Tegus is less appropriate as the foundation for an investment thesis. While speaking to experts is good, all candidates are generally biased in some way. For example, current employees generally don't bad mouth their own company, while employees of peer companies are more willing. Therefore, I do not feel that Tegus experts are good to base an investment thesis off of, but more to provide additional color to what I am seeing in the financials of a company.
Tegus provides access to a number of high-quality industry experts. I have done a number of expert calls in various industries and from various areas within similar industries and I feel that they have been able to locate experts that are knowledgeable in the relevant area that I am looking into.
Tegus has a large library of expert transcripts to choose from. The library of transcripts is really useful, as it can save a lot of time when trying to learn about a given company and/or industry. The library prevents me from having to schedule as many expert calls, so this ultimately saves me a lot of time. Also, I feel the library is not weighted to one particular area (i.e., tech) but is very evenly split.
Tegus is very efficient when finding candidates to interview. When locating particular candidates, Tegus will allow me to send them screening questions which helps to gauge how relevant and expert's knowledge is to my search. Also, Tegus will send me old transcripts of the potential experts which helps me to identify their bias or level of expertise beforehand. This is a time-saver as it helps to screen out candidates who may not be as helpful to my search.
Tegus could aggregate the transcripts a little differently where users can search by industry and/or sub-industry. Currently, searches are only done by company. However, if I am new to an industry, I may not know other companies in the industry. By allowing me to search by industry/sub-industry, I could identify those companies and read expert transcripts that could ultimately relate to the company that I am researching,
Tegus could provide a regular e-mail (i.e. daily or weekly) that would alert me to new transcripts either by company or by industry. This could help me stay on top of the companies that I follow without having to go to the website each time. Main benefit to user is having a deeper understanding of the companies I am researching as well as time saved from having to go back to the website.
Tegus could make sure candidate responses to screening questions are a little more detailed. Screening questions are nice in general, as they help identify a potential candidates fit with the user's search. However, some candidates do not provide a lot of information to the screening questions. Thus, Tegus could encourage candidates to have to provide a certain number of sentences to screening questions to help the user get a better understanding of the candidates knowledge.
AlphaSense is a very useful tool and is reasonably priced for our organization. While I may not be a hyper-active user, it's a great resource when I need to quickly do a competitive landscape survey, review publicly available documents (transcripts, etc.), or review Wall Street research
For my daily work AlphaSense is inevitable, as it holds a real added value compared to most of the CI platforms. It really makes my work more efficient and contributes to better strategy and decision making in the company. Datalog is available up to 15 years, which is a real advantage compared to other CI platforms that can only start competitor monitoring following the signature of the agreement.
The availability of Alphasense is great. I have used the software for multiple years and cannot remember ever having an outage issue. This is surprising actually, as I use other software applications that do not have regular outages, but still have outages periodically. Alphasense, on the other hand, never seems to have any outages. Good sign if I can't remember the software not working :).
Loading or performing searches on AlphaSense platform is reasonably fast for most of the time. However, it is sometimes unacceptably long for me to load PDF files (earnings presentation, supplementary financial report) on AlphaSense. Certain features might also take very long time, such as loading for "similar tables" across EDGAR filings, or downloading tables from EDGAR filings
Customer support is very prompt. I get personalized support for search recommendations and content that I could not find in my own search. Support checks in with me on a bi-monthly basis to keep me informed of the many different feature additions, I cannot find a more kind, understanding, and supportive team.
The person was prepared, attentive, understood the nature of my questions, was willing to work through any difficulties or misunderstandings, was patient, and super pleasant to work with. Great customer service.
Trainers address the basics, and such training was meant for new users. Instructions are really helpful by providing scenarios that our team will face in our daily tasks. It will be more thoughtful if the training is conducted by case studies so as to allow new users to get first-hand experience during the training.
Compared to FactSet and PitchBook, AlphaSense is a good tool to fill my suite of financial analysis. PitchBook is superior for private company and transaction data, as well as screening for similar companies (the sourcing feature of the job). FactSet is superior for financial analysis for public companies, as well as charting data. AlphaSense is superior in research for documents and deep dive industry research (mostly qualitative) and grabbing data from financial documents
I have used competing expert network firms like GLG, Guidepoint and Silverlight. GLG has a very good network of experts, which may be on par or better than Tegus. However, GLG did not have a transcript library to search through and they were very expensive. The lack of a transcript library is a big deal to me, as it results in having to schedule multiple calls, which takes up a lot of time. Guidepoint was slightly lower cost and had a good candidate pool. From memory, the pool of candidates was not as good as GLG, but good enough for how I used the service. Similarly, though, there was not a library of expert transcripts. Silverlight is the Ryanair/Spirit Airlines/Greyhound of expert networks...they will get you expert calls but the whole process is terrible. Pool of candidates is not good. They will nickel and dime you to no end. Website is difficult to use. Not worth using at all!
The sharing features provides by AlphaSense mean that it can be readily scaled for teams within an organization and, subject to compliance requirements, with client organizations. The ability to share annotations of transcripts and investor releases is valuable, and facilitates collaboration between analysts.
Research speed has now increased to a single day, allowing us to find everything we want about an industry, compared to 3-5 days before with Alphasense.
Comps analysis, gathering detailed financial information, is now seamless and can be completed in less than 1 hour, compared to 1-2 days.
Expert interview access, before Alphasense, we had no way of including this into our analysis. This has significantly improved the quality of our decisions and research.
Tegus ultimately has helped me increase my hit rate on ideas that I have published on. By helping me get a better understanding of a Company's fundamentals or relevant industry fundamentals, Tegus helps me make better investment decisions.
Tegus has increased the number of investment ideas that I generate. Given my main responsibility is to generate investment ideas, I am focused on making my research process as efficient as possible. In so doing, Tegus has increased the efficiency of my process by making the expert transcript library available. This is a key reason that I use Tegus.
Tegus has helped me to broaden my knowledge base more efficiently. By having transcripts where a subject company is mentioned but not the main focus of the interview, I learn how my subject company will impact other industries or where the company is also relevant. This helps to broaden my knowledge base outside of the standard focus for a given company.
