Sell-side and independent research provide just a starting point for the buy-side. Finding unique and proprietary information has become more and more difficult. The Web is a gold mine of buried information nuggets. Buy-side professionals are challenged with finding the time to dig out and organize the relevant data. How can Connotate’s Agent Community GEN2 give buy-side professionals an advantage in this new environment? Over the last several months Connotate Agents have been building Fundamental Trends that are providing key insights for trading, including:   

• Falling Revenue – the paid job postings being made on major web portals and job sites are being monitored as a indicator of revenue. Several hundred data points are being gathered daily to build a time series perspective. One of the major sites, which has M&A discussions swirling around its parent, shows a 15% decline in job postings during the time period while one of its competitors shows a 4% growth and another competitor shows a 72% increase in job postings.    
• Pressure on a Sector – several major travel websites have shown a decline in web traffic. The information contributed to at least one short trade decision for the website with the largest decline in traffic.    
• Hiring - the job postings of the largest employers in the US (and other regions) are being monitored as an indicator of corporate performance. Thousands of data points are being collected on a daily basis to build a time series perspective. One company removed hundreds of job postings, approximately 10%, from its website several days before announcing weak earnings. Another firm removed 200 jobs (also approximately 10% of its total jobs available) just before it announced plans to shed $400b in assets. On the other hand, Connotate’s Agents report an increase of over 25% for a tech company’s job postings, consistent with a strong quarterly report from the company.    

Click on the chart below to enlarge the image and see where Agent results show dips in job postings. 

It’s all about instant gratification sometimes.  It’s about getting what we want, how we want it and having the luxury of getting it as quickly as we can.  These days we can order and personalize almost anything we want to meet our wants and desires.  From super-sizing your fast food order to choosing and personalizing the gadgets you use on you iGoogle homepage, you can always “have it your way”.  And that trend is making its way into the workplace for sure. 

Many of us have had the luxury of evolving in our careers alongside the evolution of the internet and Web 2.0 technologies.  We’ve embraced instant messaging and social networking in both our personal and professional lives but, wait a minute, those same tools that we can use so aptly in our personal lives just don’t meet our expectations at work – we need more robust, more powerful tools that offer the same flexibility and personalization we experience in our personal tech-savvy lives.  The collective “we” I refer to however is not the typical IT professional, the collective “we” is not necessarily the CIO or Director of IT – it may be the person sitting in the cubicle next to you, it may be the Sales Coordinator who’s trying to figure out the regional “hot spots” that he needs to focus on; it may be the Clinical Research Microbiologist seeking the latest FDA approvals; it may be the Portfolio Manager looking for proprietary research to support her next trading decision…  These tools that we’ve all grown accustom to in our personal lives are driving us to find the better, more interactive solutions for sifting through the hundreds of thousands of data points available on the internet and throughout the enterprise – and then mashup comparative data points to make better sense out of them. 

The article “‘Digital Natives’ Take Charge; Get Ready for the Democratization of IT” by Bruce Molloy, CEO of Connotate, was just published in NJTech News and it’s certainly worth the read.  Addressing the emergence of “Digital Natives”and the challenges facing every organization today, you get a good feel for how user driven innovation can shape the enterprise.  And better yet, you hear how one company offers an “intelligent agent” solution that turns the flood of information out there into actionable intelligence.     

Read the entire “ ‘Digital Natives’ Take Charge; Get Ready for the Democratization of IT” article.