S&P Global Market Intelligence: Driving Financial Decisions through Smart Data

Breakstone notes that clients, from both buy- and sell-side, require greater transparency in how their decisions impact performance. On the buy-side, with the shift from active to passive investing, active investment managers are facing new pressure to justify their higher fees and benchmark performance. Seeking new ways to demonstrate outperformance has led to an unquenchable thirst for new sources of structured and unstructured data or sometimes called alternative data that might give the man edge in their investment management processes. S&P Global Market Intelligence’s dedicated experts employ a wide variety of data science tools and techniques to structure, tag, and cross reference their own proprietary content with other data sets, enabling users to perform deep quantitative industry analysis via machines.

S&P Global Market Intelligence continues to invest to advance their proprietary content sets and delivery channels. The firm continues to add many interesting and often unique products to their XpressfeedTM delivery platform, which allows for easy ingestion of unstructured and structured data into a client’s database or front-end application, enabling them to identify new relationships and alpha generating ideas. For example, S&P Global Market Intelligence has recently converted the market’s largest universe of corporate transcripts sourced from earnings calls, M&A calls and industry conferences for over 8,000 active companies globally into a machine readable format. Users can receive real time updates of live transcribed calls, with the metadata tags and unique identifier to every speaker for quantifying the sentiment of earnings calls.

The firm has also introduced a sophisticated Portfolio Analytics tool to assist portfolio managers in investment decisions process. Breakstone notes that the tool is integrated with S&P Global Market Intelligence’s proprietary Alpha Factor Library to allow portfolio managers to uncover unique insights and communicate their portfolio performance and characteristics in the context of 550 style factors within well-known investment styles such as value, growth and quality. This uniquely allows managers to show their clients, in a visually appealing way, how they are differentiated from cheaper, passive or Smart Beta solutions. The web-based tool also provides them with an extensive report library and flexible reporting tools, which are actively used to provide transparency and showcase results–relative to both standard and alternative benchmarks. Forging ahead, the firm focuses on automating the portfolio ingestion process and expanding reporting capabilities.