The Company
Rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, Summitry LLC is a boutique wealth management firm offering personalized financial planning and investment strategies to help their clients pursue their best quality of life. Their three core values—Care, Grow, and Drive—guide them toward building cohesive and collaborative partnerships with their clients and setting a foundation for how they operate as a business. The firm prides itself on curating a unique approach to wealth management by emphasizing a keen attention to detail and an eye toward managing downside risk.
Saying “Goodbye” To High-Cost Expert Networks
Michael Kon is the Director of Research and Portfolio Manager at Summitry. On top of managing a team of three analysts, he serves on Summitry’s leadership team, the Investment Committee, as well the Investment Oversight Committee. Given Summitry’s emphasis on data-driven results, Michael and his team consistently look for ways to optimize their research process and uncover deeper insights into market dynamics.
For decades, they relied on expert networks like GLG to conduct expert calls, however, these credit-based systems produced cost inefficiencies and were “hit or miss” on producing the most valuable insights. With the uptick in innovation around expert call transcript libraries, Michael made the case to explore other options and settled on AlphaSense Expert Insights before adopting the AlphaSense platform in full.
Seeing “The Full Picture”
Michael has used AlphaSense Expert Insights significantly, primarily to guide decision-making around specific investment ideas. “We dive into expert interviews on AlphaSense to find specific insights on competitive dynamics within an industry, understand specific business models, and understand suppliers and customer relationships and bargain power.” Additionally, Michael receives emails every time a new interview is conducted and can pull the transcript once it’s published in the library, further optimizing his research process.
In a recent investment research project, Michael and his team faced a situation where they were investigating a company that has two larger competitors within the same industry and uses its competitors to distribute its products. The Summitry team was concerned about a possible conflict of interest; however, Michael found an interview with one of the distributors in the AlphaSense Expert Transcript Library that alleviated their concerns. The interview revealed that the company has a strong working relationship with the competitor, emphasizing a collaborative approach to market engagement that eased their apprehensions.
“AlphaSense’s expert interviews open the door to new insights that we weren’t able to gain before. It expands our circle of competence because we can answer more complex questions now with the help of industry experts.”
– Michael Kon, Director of Research and Portfolio Manager
Reflecting on the efficiency gains, Michael emphasized the significance of now getting “the full picture” in the research process by reviewing AlphaSense’s extensive transcript library instead of having to conduct the interviews on his own time. AlphaSense’s ability to aggregate insights from diverse sources into a single platform streamlined Summitry’s research workflow.
“Whenever we’d conduct a single interview, we’d always walk away wondering if we have got the full picture. With AlphaSense Expert Insights, we know we have significantly more pieces of the puzzle because of the scale and depth of the transcripts that cover a specific topic from a variety of angles and perspectives.”
Looking Ahead
Excited about future advancements, Michael expressed interest in further leveraging AlphaSense’s broad content set and AI-driven capabilities, “There’s potential for AlphaSense Assistant to enhance efficiency and provide more targeted insights.” The Summitry team looks forward to exploring other capabilities within AlphaSense to refine their investment strategy, such as setting up alerts for when new documents are published covering key topics and better leveraging AlphaSense’s AI-powered Keyword Smart Search.
Disclosure: AlphaSense is not a current client of Summitry. No compensation was provided in connection with this endorsement. Summitry has a business relationship with Alpha Sense in which it pays a fee.
Get started today
The world’s leading corporations and financial institutions—including a majority of the S&P 500, over 85% of the S&P 100, and 75% of the top asset management firms—trust AlphaSense for smarter, faster decisions.
Start my free trial
