Introduction
Equity research is produced by thousands of analysts worldwide to provide the market with valuable information on companies, industries, and market trends. Today, over 90% of equity research is consumed by fund managers, who have the Wall Street relationships and entitlements to acquire it. For corporate strategy professionals who lack this access, however, equity research has historically been challenging to obtain and navigate.
To help corporations navigate these challenges, AlphaSense offers Wall Street Insights, the first equity research collection purpose-built for the corporate user. Through the AlphaSense platform, any business making strategic plans or product decisions, conducting competitive analysis, evaluating M&A, or engaging in investor relations can now tap into the deep industry expertise of Wall Street’s top analysts.
Chapter 1
What is Equity Research?
Equity research is developed by sell-side firms to help investors and hedge fund managers discover market opportunities and make informed investment decisions. Increasingly, this expert analysis has also been identified by forward-looking corporations as a highly valuable tool to inform strategic decision-making.
Equity research analysts are deep subject matter experts who are often former executives, industry veterans, or academics. These analysts conduct in-depth research and publish reports on corporations, industries, and macro trends, offering an expert lens into a subject.
Today, equity research is increasingly relied upon by corporate teams as a high-value source of information. These teams leverage equity research to make strategic business plans, conduct competitive analysis, evaluate mergers and acquisitions, and make product and marketing decisions. For corporations, the value of equity research lies in the detailed coverage of their company, their competitors, and how they are performing related to the marketplace they are within.
An equity research report is a document prepared by an equity research analyst that often provides insight on whether investors should buy, hold, or sell shares of a public company. In an equity research report, an analyst lays out their recommendation, target price, investment thesis, valuation, and risks.
What is Included in a Typical Equity Research Report?
Research reports don’t need to follow a specific formula. Analysts at different investment banks have some latitude in determining the look and feel of their reports. But more often than not, research reports follow a certain protocol of what investors expect them to look like.
A typical equity research report includes in-depth industry research, management analysis, financial histories, trends, forecasting, valuations, and recommendations for investors. Sometimes called broker research reports or investment research reports, equity research reports are designed to provide a comprehensive snapshot that investors or corporate leaders can leverage to make informed decisions.
Here’s a quick overview of what a standard equity research report covers:
Recent Results and Announcements
This section covers events, such as quarterly results, guidance, and general company updates.
Upgrades/Downgrades
Upgrades/Downgrades are positive or negative changes in an analyst’s outlook of a particular stock valuation. These updates are usually triggered by qualitative and quantitative analysis that contributes to an increase or decrease in the financial valuation of that security.
Estimate/Price Target Revisions
Estimates are detailed projections of what a company will earn over the next several years. Valuations of those earnings estimates form price targets. The price target is based on assumptions about the asset’s future supply & demand and fundamentals.
Management Overview and Commentary
Management Overview and Commentary helps potential investors understand the quality and makeup of a company’s management team. This section can also include a history of leadership within the company and their record with capital allocation, ESG, compensation, incentives, stock ownership. Plus, an overview of the company’s board of directors.
Industry Overview
This section covers competitors, industry trends, and a company’s standing among its sector. Industry research includes everything from politics to economics, social trends, technological innovation, and more.
Historical Financial Results
Historical Financial Results typically cover the history of a company’s stock, plus expectations based on the current market and events surrounding it. To determine if a company is at or above market expectations, Analysts must deeply understand the history of a specific industry and find patterns or trends to support their recommendations.
Valuation
Based on the market analysis, historical financial results, etc., an analyst will run equity valuation models. In some cases, analysts will run more than one valuation model to determine the worth of company stock or asset.
Absolute valuation models: calculate a company’s or asset’s inherent value.
Relative equity valuation models: calculate a company’s or asset’s value relative to another company or asset. Relative valuations base their numbers on price/sales, price/earnings, price/cash flow.
Recommendations
An equity research analyst’s recommendation to buy, hold, or sell. The analyst also will have a target price that tells investors where they expect the stock to be in a year’s time.
Related Reading: Best Stock and Investment Research Tools (Buyer’s Guide)
Sell-Side vs Buy-Side Research: Comparison Guide
Chapter 2
How Can Corporate Teams Access Equity Research?
If you were to Google “equity research reports,” you would not get access to equity research, earnings call transcripts, or trade journals. You would, however, discover an unmanageable amount of noise to sift through.
Accessing equity research reports is highly dependent on relationships and entitlements. Unlike financial firms and investor relations teams, who can access equity research by procuring the right entitlements, corporate teams have a much harder time finding and purchasing high-quality equity research.
If you were to search online for equity research, for example, you would be presented with sub-par options such as:
Research Resellers
Some websites allow you to search for research reports on companies or by firms. Some of the reports are free, but you must pay for most of them. Prices range from just $15 to thousands of dollars.
Summary Sites
If you want just the bottom-line recommendations from analysts, many sites summarize the data. Nearly all the websites that provide stock quotes also compile analyst recommendations; however, you will only get the big picture and not any of the detailed analysis.
Research Providers
Some independent research providers sell their reports directly to investors. These reports typically include an overview of what a stock’s price could be, plus an analysis of the company’s earnings.
The majority of equity research is completely unsearchable, which is why AlphaSense’s Wall Street Insights is changing the game for corporations globally. Now, with WSI, corporations can leverage this high-quality research to augment their understanding of specific companies and industries; plus, AlphaSense’s corporate clients can now conduct more meaningful analysis and make more data-driven decisions.
Real-time vs. Aftermarket
Real-Time Research: Real-Time research is available to eligible users (based on an entitlement) immediately upon publication by the broker. Financial services users with entitlements are the primary consumers of real-time research, while some corporate professionals are also eligible. Payment for real-time research is made directly from clients to brokers through trading commissions or hard dollar agreements.
Aftermarket Research: Aftermarket research is a collection of many of the same documents as the real-time collection, but it is available after a zero to fifteen-day delay. Investment bankers, consultants, and corporate users are the primary consumers of aftermarket research.
Chapter 3
What is Wall Street Insights (WSI)?
Wall Street Insights® is the first and only equity research collection purpose-built for the corporate market, providing corporations unprecedented access to a deep pool of equity research reports from thousands of expert analysts.
Through partnerships with Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Barclays, as well as exclusive partnerships with Citi and Goldman Sachs among others, corporate professionals can now access the world’s most revered equity research, indexed and searchable in the AlphaSense platform.
From macro market trends and industry analyses to company deep-dives, the Wall Street Insights® content collection provides corporate professionals with a 360-degree view of every market. With the valuable expertise of thousands of analysts on your side, corporate teams can quickly compare insights, validate internal assumptions, and generate new ideas to guide critical business decisions and strategies.
In terms of search and accessibility, Wall Street Insights® is the first of its kind. Not only does AlphaSense offer hard-to-find equity research reports, but we also provide a robust and seamless search experience.
Chapter 4
What Equity Research Do You Get Access to with AlphaSense?
On the AlphaSense platform, users can access several critical types of equity research reports, including:
- Company Reports – Issued periodically over the course of an analyst’s or firm’s time covering said stock and include:
- Upgrades/downgrades: published when a stock analyst changes their opinion of a stock, and subsequently, their investment recommendation
- Estimate / price target revisions: published when an analyst revises their previous price target (their prediction of the future price of a security)
- Initiation reports: published when a broker first begins covering a company
- Credit research
- All other company reports
- Industry reports – Analyze a set of companies within the same industry
- Fixed income reports – Demonstrate maturity distribution of portfolios
- Economic/macro reports – Shares analysts’ views on growth expectations, inflation, stock market volatility, and global market trade
- Commodities reports – Provide analysis of commodities within a particular industry, published weekly or monthly
Using these reports, companies can perform the following key strategic tasks:
- Create investment ideas
- Monitor peers in real-time (and discover what equity research is being produced about them)
- Model and evaluate companies (for M&A or general benchmarking)
- Dive deep into customers, partners, and prospects
- Get up-to-speed quickly on specific industry trends
- Prepare for earnings season
Chapter 5
Unlock More Value From Equity Research With Artificial Intelligence and Automation
When you rely on an equity research platform with purpose-built AI technology, you can be more confident in your research, knowing you are no longer at the mercy of human error. AlphaSense also allows you to automate certain research processes that previously would have required hours of manual work, streamlining your entire process so you can take action and make mission-critical decisions faster than ever.
Here’s how our advanced AI technology can transform your workflow:
Generative Search
Generative Search is a conversational search experience that allows users to ask natural-language questions and source intelligence at scale from across premium external content, internal knowledge, and quantitative data sources. Each answer provides citations to the exact snippet of text from where the information was sourced, so that it can always be referenced back.
With Deep Research mode, users can automate the creation of in-depth analysis about companies, trends, or industry topics. The model conducts dozens of searches, parses through thousands of potentially relevant results, and reasons over all of it to produce comprehensive, detailed analysis about any topic — in a fraction of the time it would take a human.
You can also take Generative Search on the go with our mobile app, giving you access to instant answers, wherever you work.
Generative Grid
Generative Grid applies multiple genAI prompts across many documents at the same time to quickly provide organized answers to research questions at scale, in an easy-to-read table format. This enables users to summarize documents using pre-built criteria to save time when executing repeatable workflows.
Generative Grid pulls data from both premium external documents in the AlphaSense platform and users’ internal content. From there, users can choose pre-built templates or create their own to automate routine workflows. Each summary provides a direct citation to the source material it was pulled from.
Users can leverage this tool to track earnings transcripts, compare competitors at a glance, parse through deal rooms in seconds, track macro event impacts, or analyze merger proxy filings, among many use cases.
Workflow Agents
AlphaSense offers a full library of pre-built automations for your most common and time-consuming research workflows and deliverables — including company primers, meeting prep briefings, earnings analysis, and more. Users can also build custom agents personalized to their specific needs, data sets, or evaluation criteria — and even schedule them to run on a daily or weekly cadence.
Here are just a few ways teams can leverage Workflow Agents:
- Company and leadership profile agents that only pull the unique information needed, helping consulting teams get up to speed on a new client more quickly
- News roundup agents that deliver pre-built reports straight to investor relations analysts’ inboxes on a pre-set schedule, ensuring they can always stay ahead of potential issues
- Targeted watchlist update agents that help corporate development teams keep track of their targets with minimal effort, while ensuring they don’t miss any crucial information
Smart Summaries
This feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights (reducing time spent on research during earnings season), quickly capture company outlook and bull/bear cases from analyst research, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees. All Summaries provide you with citations to the exact snippets of text from where the summaries are sourced — combining high accuracy with easy verification.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis, a natural language processing (NLP)-based feature, parses through content and identifies nuances in the tone and subjective meaning of text. It then uses color coding to help readers identify the document’s positive, negative, and neutral sentiments.
This technology assigns each search term a numerical sentiment change score to help users track any slight change in market sentiment over time. Users can take advantage of it to make better-informed investment decisions and improve risk management strategies.
Level Up Your Equity Research Strategy With AlphaSense
AlphaSense is the leading equity research platform for modern financial and research professionals. Trusted by 88% of the S&P 100, 90% of the top asset management firms, 95% of the top consulting companies, and 92% of the largest pharmaceutical companies, AlphaSense delivers insights that drive growth to organizations and research teams across industries and around the globe.
Providing a 360-degree view of every market — from macro trends and industry analyses to company deep-dives and individual stock valuations — AlphaSense’s Wall Street Insights® is a key component of an investment research workflow that wins.
Discover the power of equity research reports with AlphaSense today.
