Fundamental Investment Strategy
There are many challenges to an Optimised Fundamental Investment Research Process.
As a fundamental investment manager, whether you take a bottom-up or a top-down approach, you know the practical challenges of implementing a robust fundamental investment research process.
Given that calculating the intrinsic value and risk profile for every company relies on the methods and skills of individual analysts and the data sources they use, how do you make sure that:
Is a bespoke software solution the answer?
Very seldom, and not without big investment and its own risks.
Many companies have tried solving these challenges with an inhouse development team. But given the complexity of the processes, the ideal development team needs an exceptionally good understanding of asset management to create a system that solves problems for analysts.
If you can recruit such a team, the solution becomes dependent on the individual developers who build the system, creating problems when they leave. Furthermore, business logic often sits in code, making it hard for analysts to see what calculations and logic are applied to their models.
What would an ideal fundamental investment process achieve?
In an ideal situation, fundamental investment managers wouldn’t have to worry about these operational challenges. You would be using a system that:
Such a solution would optimise the process while at the same time capturing your company’s investment IP within a system independent of team members’ individual genius and data providers.
The Quintessence platform:
Without being able to do this, you run the risk of having the same calculation or analysis being done in different ways with diverging results over time. Besides making it easy to see what logic has been applied, the system shows how models changed over time and makes it easy to reuse an analyst’s work in future analyses.
Besides quickly generating new reports to discuss in your investment meetings (for example generating a snail trail of a company’s ranking over time), Quintessence allows you to perform retrospectives on investment decisions and assess an analyst’s efficiency and performance.
Analysts want to manipulate data with software that works for them. Quintessence allows them to access and dig into the data in Microsoft Excel or any other data analysis software, and then upload their work back to the Quintessence platform directly from their tool of choice.
Using a system that is data agnostic can minimise data costs while giving analysts the option to use data from different sources.
As the strategy of your investment company changes, the models used to analyse instruments and the data being analysed will change. With Quintessence, you can track and compare these changes. The platform also accommodates data changing daily, weekly, monthly or annually, and enables analysts to easily run analyses on historic data.
With Quintessence, all data is mapped to the data model so that any calculations, metrics or logic are automatically applied consistently across the organisation.