In a previous post I said, “Our mission is to build an intelligent, enriched and fully interactive database from all the publicly available reports to improve the productivity and insight of the analyst covering an industry sector.” We call it O.A.K.L.E.Y and we're now creating the services around it.
Convenient, Comparative, Contextual and Interactive services like ours will provide a foundation and no doubt be successful and but that’s not our end goal.
Competitive. We build tools for competitive analysis, but more importantly we want to build tools that help you compete, in your job and in your markets. We can’t stop with a better version of what you can get elsewhere. While there might be a market for a less expensive Bloomberg, what’s the competitive differentiator for you? You have the same service as the rest of the market, which brings us to an interesting dilemma: if we build a great service, after the early adopters exploit the advantage, everyone is equal again. This is where our A.I. needs to augment your intelligence, not supply its own.
Intelligence. With our first products we’re using A.I. to “read” the market and company information so you can be more efficient in your research. This is the 1st order of intelligence. It is like going to school to learn finance and then working the back room reading and reporting on company results. It is the foundation for the next step in your career, using that knowledge to make investment decisions. As the impact of MIFID II hits, our products will help you build a bigger and faster knowledge base with no bias and 100% recall at web speed and scale. Our products don’t get tired. That alone will help you beat the market.
Better but still doing all the intelligent work of finding the market opportunities.
Here’s where most take the easy way out, focus on speed and trades, not investing. HFT uses A.I. and is in fact one of the most pervasive and advanced A.I.s in the world, second only to computer viruses and cyber bots. This is a common execution of an AI strategy, go straight from the research department to the 3rd order of intelligence, an A.I. making autonomous decisions, think IBM Watson, no humans required. We think that’s the wrong approach. Black boxes powered by AI are as risky as they are powerful.
Our goal is to deliver collaborative A.I., a 2nd order of machine intelligence. Our soon to be announced Boulder Earnings Call Tracker (BECT) for Investor Relations, Analysts, Portfolio Managers and Independent Research is our first offering at the next level.
Simply, the 2nd order is collaborative and pulls out multiple dimensions of sentiment and tone built with new analytics methods that provide the nuance missing from today's offerings. It enables you to create completely new strategies once you’ve been able to look at your markets and competitors at a deeper level and at machine speed and scale.
In the past, long term was long term and even when you were right, it may have been years before the market rewarded you for your positions. Information was created, reported and analyzed from the paradigm of quarterly reports and press releases. Your technology, economic and geopolitical models were relatively fixed. Sectors followed predictable patterns. We think that has changed.
Markets have moved to the “second half of the chessboard” where exponential changes will create and destroy large enterprises (wealth) in quarters not decades. What are considered fundamental long term investment decisions today, will look like day trades in the future.
Our goal is to bring the 2nd order of intelligence to you, providing a foundation for contextual decisions and empowering you with individualized tools to compete and win, whether competing with a machine or another trader.
You won't be able to read fast enough, you need to retool and the first ones to do it will win. In the immortal words of Walter Gretzky, as passed on through his son Wayne: “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”
