Introduction
Equity research, which forms a multi-billion dollar industry for investment banks, 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 to acquire it and the analyst resources to mine it for insights. For corporate strategy professionals who lack this access, however, equity research has historically been challenging to obtain and navigate.
To help corporations circumvent these challenges, AlphaSense has introduced Wall Street Insights, the first and only 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.
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.
There are thousands of sell-side firms that employ expert analysts around the globe to write equity research for the market. The majority of firms producing equity research are hyper-focused and only have one or two analysts developing reports on a specific industry. However, larger firms, such as Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, collectively employ thousands of analysts to write reports on thousands of public companies–covering everything from TMT giants to niche products.
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.
Historically, over 90% of equity research was consumed by buy-side fund managers, who had the Wall Street relationships to acquire it and the analyst resources to mine it for insights. For buy-side professionals, equity research is a critical tool to inform sound investment decisions backed by expert insights.
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.
What is an Equity Research Report?
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.
There are multiple forms of equity research, including (but not limited to):
An update report that highlights the latest news, company announcements, earnings reports, Buy Sell Hold ratings, M&A activity, anything that impacts the value of the company.
A comprehensive company report that is compiled when an analyst or firm initiates their coverage of a stock. Initiation reports cover all of the divisions and products of a company in-depth to provide a baseline of what the company is and how it is performing. Initiation reports can be tens to hundreds of pages long, depending on the complexity of a company.
General industry updates that cover a group of similar companies within a sector. Industry-specific reports typically dive into additional factors such as loan growth, interest rates, interest income, net income, and regulatory capital.
A report compiled by research firms either daily or weekly. These reports can often be a great place to get more in-depth insight on commodities and also get market opinions from commodity analysts or traders who write the reports.
A quick 1-2 page report that comments on a news release from a company or other quick information
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:
This section covers events, such as quarterly results, guidance, and general company updates.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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: calculates a company’s or asset’s inherent value.
Relative equity valuation models: calculates 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.
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)
What Does an Equity Research Analyst Do?
Equity research analysts exist on both the buy-side and the sell-side of the financial services market. Although these roles differ, both buy-side and sell-side analysts produce reports, projections, and recommendations for specific companies and stocks.
An equity research analyst specializes in a group of companies in a particular industry or country to develop high-level expertise and produce accurate projects and recommendations. Since ER analysts generally focus on a small set of stocks (5-20), they become specialists in those specific companies and industries that they evaluate or follow. These analysts monitor market data and news reports and speak to contacts within the companies/industries they study to update their research daily.
Analysts need to comprehend everything about their ‘coverage’ to give investment endorsements. Equity research analysts must be conversant with the business regulations and regime policies within the country to decide how it will affect the market environment and business in general. The more you understand the industries in detail, the easier it will be for you to decipher market dynamics.
One prevalent aspect of an equity research analyst’s job is building and maintaining valuable relationships with corporate leaders, clients, and peers. Equity research is largely about an analyst’s ability to service clients and provide insightful ideas that positively influence their investing strategy.
EQUITY RESEARCH ANALYSTS:
- Analyze stocks to help portfolio managers make better-informed investment decisions.
- Analyze a stock against market activity to predict a stock’s outlook.
- Develop investment models and provide trading strategies.
- Provide expertise on markets and industries based on their competitive analysis, business analysis, and market research.
- Use data to model and measure the financial risk associated with particular investment decisions.
- Understand the details of various markets to compare a company’s and sector’s stock
Buy-Side vs. Sell-Side Analysts
Although the roles of buy-side and sell-side analysts do overlap in some respects, the purpose of their research differs.
Related Reading: Sell-Side vs Buy-Side Research: Comparison Guide
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, particularly for corporate teams. 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:
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.
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.
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. These reports often cost less than $100 but can be more.
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 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.
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, Bank of America, Barclays, Bernstein, Bernstein Autonomous, Cowen, Deutsche Bank, Evercore ISI, HSBC, and 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.
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
Related Reading: 7 Things You Miss By Only Using Bloomberg for Investment Research
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
Unlock More Value From Equity Research With Artificial Intelligence and Automation
When you rely on an equity research platform that utilizes the power of AI search 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 semantic search and smart automations can transform your workflow:
Smart Search
Smart Search technology doesn’t just recognize the keywords included in your query—it understands the intent behind your search, delivering content sources with the highest relevance and value to your search. It allows you to find all relevant data points with a single search, saving countless hours and increasing precision in your research.
Additionally, broker research is often inconsistently tagged because different firms may use different classification taxonomies, or include their own terms to define industries and trends. In addition to recognizing relevant language patterns, Smart Search assigns correct tagging to reports from thousands of analysts and research firms, regardless of which analyst published the report.
Smart Synonyms™, our proprietary element of Smart Search, weeds out the sources that may include similar keywords but are not topically significant to your research, meaning you’ll never have to cut through excess noise to find the insights you need.
Relevance Rankings
AlphaSense automatically ranks results by their relevance to your research using a number of algorithmic factors, including search term proximity, Smart Synonyms™, and document decay. You can be confident that the content sources at the top of your search results page are the ones most aligned with your current research needs.
Real-Time Monitoring
Without a centralized search system, analysts are left to perform multiple manual searches and parse through Google Alerts for the ones with real relevance. On the AlphaSense platform, real-time alerts are customizable and can be set up for a particular company, industry, keyword, or topic (or a set/list of any of the above).
Additionally, you can easily set up customizable dashboards and watchlists to monitor the industries, topics, and companies of interest to you and ensure that you receive instant notifications of any pertinent updates—without getting bogged down by alerts that are not relevant to your research.
Smart Summaries
AlphaSense’s generative AI is purpose-built for business professionals, leaning on 10+ years of AI tech development. Our proprietary genAI tool, Smart Summaries, generates insights across all four key perspectives—company documents, news, expert calls, and broker research.
Sourced from across all broker research you are entitled to, published within the past 90 days, Smart Summaries covers sections including:
- Upgrades and downgrades – Covers which brokers have upgraded/downgraded this company within the past 90 days and why
- SWOT analysis – Covers the topics/trends identified as strengths/opportunities or threats/weaknesses from across broker reports about this company
- Competitive landscape – Covers the competitive landscape for this company from across broker reports
Generative Search
Our generative AI chat experience transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources. Our chatbot is trained to think like an analyst, so it understands the market research intent behind your natural language queries. Whenever you search for information, our genAI is available to summarize key company events, emerging topics, and industry-wide viewpoints. You can dig deeper into topics by asking follow-up questions or choosing a suggested query.
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, 80% of the top asset management firms, 95% of the top consulting companies, and 20 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.
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