The Essential Tools for Crushing Earnings Season

Let’s face it: earnings season is saturated with information.

Between press releases, earnings calls, company presentations, financials, and credit rating changes, there’s more content to sift through than hours in the day. And often, the most important insights come from analyzing tiny, easy-to-miss details and finding patterns in questions, tone, and sentiment; meaning the ability to find the few key pieces of information in the proverbial haystack of documents is critical to success.

With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of the essential tools within AlphaSense to collect, synthesize, and contextualize earnings performance–so that you can conquer information overload and improve the speed and agility with which you produce reports and make decisions.

Tip 1: Customize your monitoring tools

Tools: Dashboard, Saved searches, Alerts

Preparation for the storm of earnings begins with optimizing all of the monitoring tools you already use, along with those you haven’t yet taken advantage of.

• Design a dashboard that covers all your portfolio companies. Stay on top of trending topics and be the first to know about any expert interviews or news articles that are released in the days and weeks leading up to calls to catch any potential trends you’d like to ask about. Read all about how to create an earnings dashboard using watchlists and pre-built searches on our help center!
• Leverage saved searches for when your competitors, peers, or partners are holding earnings calls in preparation for the season, and for key takeaways in the days and weeks following. Make sure to add relevant ticker symbols or company names to the searches linked above and set up an alert to be notified when new info gets released.
• Create real-time alerts for the most important updates, like a call transcript being published or news articles focusing on the most pertinent trends for the companies in your portfolio. Make sure you’ve downloaded the AlphaSense iOS app and enable push notifications to get real-time alerts sent right to your mobile device.

Tip 2: Use AI to synthesize your analysis faster

Tools: Document insights, Sentiment analysis, Table tools

If customizing your monitoring tools helps you prepare and act quickly for earnings by gathering any and all relevant information, our AI tools are the essential piece for synthesizing all of that info into coherent, meaningful analyses, quickly.

• Leverage the insights tab of an earnings transcript to quickly identify document KPIs & topics, ranked by sentiment score (how favorably they’re spoken about). Dive deeper into each theme and explore by positive or negative mentions, or look into how the discussion of this topic has changed over time.
• Contextualize your analysis of earnings calls by leveraging information from external, primary sources. Find answers to what goes unspoken or left between the lines in an earnings call from former executives, customers, and competitors in our Stream expert call library.
• Streamline your quantitative analysis by using our table tools to export modeled time-series data on company financials. Plus, use the black-lining feature to automatically identify any QoQ changes in SEC filings.

Tip 3: Make the most of every minute with mobile

Tools: Alerts, Dashboards, Audio player

Integrating mobile into your workflow doesn’t just make it feel like work is more seamless–it actually improves productivity. And during earnings, when there just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to listen and synthesize every call, making the most of any micro-opportunity can mean the difference between getting home at a reasonable hour and staying in the office until dawn.

• Listen to calls from anywhere with our recently-launched mobile audio player. Find key sections by searching for keywords or navigating to your annotations and click on the timestamps to launch audio right from that section. Or, treat calls like a podcast and make the most of your morning commute, gym session, or even your morning coffee run by listening to the full audio.
• Take work offline by bookmarking and downloading key documents, right from our mobile app. The transition between desktop and mobile is seamless–all of your bookmarks, notes, and annotations save across your devices.
• Act on key insights in real-time by setting up push notification alerts. Plus, leverage our annotation tools to take notes or highlight relevant sections and quickly share out with members of your team.

One analyst found that he saved 25% of his time by using AlphaSense’s suite of tools during earnings, freeing his time to work on analyzing his findings, refining his strategy, and formulating opinions.

Ready to get started? Start designing your dashboards and alerts today, and make sure to download our mobile app.

Not yet an AlphaSense user? Request a trial.