Why Your Next Investment Writer Will Be a Machine
The next time you need an investment writer, don’t bother calling HR. That was BEFORE. Before a firm in Chicago made software to report out baseball game stats. Before artificial intelligence began writing stories. Before AI went from sports to finance. Before algorithms jumped from high-frequency trading to monthly reports.
Generating stories at the click of a bottom based on deep data sets–that’s NOW–and Chicago-based Narrative Science has been a pioneer and the most visible face of this fin tech gadgetry since 2010. ‘Gadgetry’ might be the wrong term, since this development promises to upend asset managers’ reporting processes and force a rethink of the investment writing function, along with the need to hire an actual human being for an investment writer role.
An umbrella for reporting season
With this new tool, Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel says producing something like an investment strategy [pooled fund or SMA] report “goes from the job of a small army of people over weeks to just a few seconds.” As anyone familiar with the month-end and quarter-end rush periods knows, this represents a dramatic improvement over the status quo. The firm says that their asset manager clients have been able to ‘reduce the number of days spent producing portfolio commentaries by 50% to 75%’ delivering reports that are marketing-approved and compliance compliant.
If it all sounds to good to be true, that’s not the word I would use. In my opinion, it’s something else entirely: eery. I actually got chills watching the 3-minute video below on how Narrative Science’s Quill is being used to expand Credit Suisse’s investment research coverage. The algorithms identify trends and report in plain (analyst) language what’s going on with a given company (eBay in this case).
Astonishing.
(For website owners, you can enjoy Quill Engage –their Google Analytics app for site analytics– for free.)
The new wave
Turning data and analytics into stories clearly has momentum. In March 2014 the Financial Times reported that Fidelity was testing technologies offered by Narrative Science and Kensho, among others. Narrative Science counts American Century Investments and Nuveen Investments along with
March 04, 2015
@Minh, thanks for sharing my post. Here's the full text + video. http://15-wordeconomy.com/inv-writer-machine/
Posted by: Ryan | March 06, 2015 at 08:32 PM