Investment research is essential for making credible evaluations of stocks, companies, and financial institutions. But it takes time to separate the bulls from the bears and determine a potential company’s trajectory. Combing through mountains of data to make a decision can be onerous, even for the most savvy of investors.
Fortunately, there is now an abundance of solutions and managed services that can streamline and expedite this process. These services and solutions can provide you with access to robust information from disparate sources, synthesize it, and create an overarching perspective on the direction a company is heading.
Here’s how web data integration (WDI) managed services and solutions can help with investment research and provide you with the information needed to thrive.
Assess New Startups
There’s a lot of risk and reward involved with investing in new startups.
Many are shaky, with more than half of all startups failing within five years. There are, however, those shooting stars that grow and succeed no matter the odds.
According to Small Business Trends, the finance, insurance, and real estate industries are most successful on average, with 58% still in operation after four years. But it’s hard to say who you should put your money on.
Finding the diamond in the rough is certainly possible and highly lucrative, but seldom is it easy. Often, there’s limited information to go on, and you have to go outside the box to unearth meaningful data.
When assessing new companies, tech startup help provider RocketSpace says venture capitalists primarily look at:
- The founding team (in particular their talent level, experience, passion, and ability)
- Current market outlook
- Company momentum
- Competition level
These are the givens for making a basic assessment and determining what your ROI would likely be.
But WDI services and solutions can take it one step further. They enable you to search through massive online databases and generate helpful, up-to-date information to guide your decision-making.
The web is the world’s largest data repository. Tapping into it with WDI provides comprehensive insights into critical information like customer attitudes, opinions, and interests to help you gauge a startup’s potential.
Make Key Comparisons
What’s the current competitive climate? What distinguishes a particular product from the dozens of others that are available? Could top rivals foil even the most innovative of ideas?
These are the kinds of questions investors ask when getting a feel for a company and its potential.
Making key comparisons offers vital objectivity so you can tell how a company fits into their industry at large. It also lets you know how difficult it will be to stand out from the pack.
Investors can use web data integration to make up-close comparisons between similar companies to determine which are the smartest investments.
How? Web data paints a very telling picture of a company’s competition level. By understanding how rivals are positioned and public perception of other businesses in the industry, investors can gain timely views of a company’s competitive landscape.
The main problem, however, is making sense of such a large volume of data. Fortunately, WDI and extraction managed services and solutions condense data in a way that provides you with practical, applicable insights without having to manually sift through loads of information.
Analyze Current Industry Trends
Investment success is largely contingent upon fast decision-making. It’s about striking while the iron is hot and capitalizing on amazing opportunities before other investors do.
Of course, making the right decision quickly is easier said than done. You can always use conventional metrics like profitability, liquidity, and valuation ratios to quickly get a sense of a company’s overall health. These should provide a basic overview.
But analyzing current industry trends goes even deeper and provides you with a real-time vantage point of what’s going on to optimize your decision-making. That way you can make lightning-fast decisions and stay ahead of the curve.
WDI solutions facilitate quicker decision-making because of their ability to pull data from multiple resources.
For example, they can extract three key types of data:
- Displayed data – through scraping of visually-accessible data on web pages and HTML, and via extraction of unstructured data including images, maps, etc.
- Hidden data – extraction from within non-visible data in web pages, documents, meta-data, or via multi-step approaches, employing logins and so on.
- Derived data – through a combination of multiple sets, doing calculations on time series data, and more.
Combine all of these to create highly-structured, organized data you can put to good use right away.
Market research company Meidata is a great example of a business that uses WDI solutions to facilitate their research. They require a large volume of data to gain insights and make the right decisions. Data extraction enables them to do this and build the necessary data and research infrastructure to aid in their managers’ decision-making.
See What People Are Saying on Social Media
Social networks may not be conventional resources for evaluating stocks, companies, and financial institutions, but they’re ideal for determining which brands are popular. Likes, comments, follows, subscriptions, and other engagement can paint a clear picture of public opinion on a brand.
And there’s a sound body of evidence to suggest a correlation between social media sentiment and stock prices.
Jay Baer of Convince & Convert offers a couple of examples:
- A drop in Twitter public sentiment toward Facebook led to lower Facebook IPO stock prices within 25 minutes of the drop.
- In one study, 99.95% of changes in companies’ stock prices could be explained by an increase or decrease in Facebook sentiment.
- 73% of investors use LinkedIn to research potential investments.
Wall Street brokers and big businesses are even incorporating sentiment analysis into their stock market algorithms so they know how consumers feel about brands 24/7.
So the correlation between public opinion on social media and a brand’s success (at least short-term) is undeniable. Knowing what people are collectively saying about a brand can definitely shape investment strategy.
The problem is that doing this manually is meticulous, back-breaking work. Continually sifting through heaps of data just isn’t practical.
That’s where WDI managed services and solutions come in. They help investors streamline the process by extracting, preparing, and integrating useful information. This ensures access to high-quality, reliable, and clean data that’s legitimately useful for investment research.
In turn, you’re better able to predict which companies are poised for success.
By now, the value of using web data to inform investment research should be apparent. Web data integration managed services and solutions have numerous applications, so investment managers and analysts who take advantage of them have a lot to gain.
Improving Your Investment Research Methods
In some cases, picking an innovative, high-growth company is done on a hunch. Some investors can just “feel it.” But more often than not, it involves a significant amount of research.
The beautiful thing about modern investing is the wide array of resources that are available for investment research. Stock charts, stock analyzers, and even social media are all useful for seeing the big picture and making well-informed decisions.
WDI managed services and solutions can be incredibly advantageous and are capable of synthesizing a massive volume of information into easily digestible insights.
Understanding these offerings and incorporating them into your investment research strategy should help you fine-tune your approach and capitalize on available data.