The best stock and investment research tools power more agile, informed investment strategies. Level up your ability to capitalize on opportunities ahead of your competitors with insights from the top data sources in the investment world supported by the newest technologies – including AI-powered search and automated monitoring.
But before we tread into some specific solutions currently available, let’s take a closer examination of 5 features and functionalities to look for in a quality stock and investment research tool in 2024
Access to Premium Content
Even the wisest, street-smart research analyst has limitations on what they can sift through using traditional searching. Sources from the company website, search engines, public reports, and stock analysis websites only reveal a piece of the full picture. Organizations care for the carefully chosen items they want to make publicly known to help shape public opinion while keeping much of the most important information secret.
Moreover, broker research is an incredibly valuable source of industry insight. However, it can often only be accessed behind paywalls and may require firms to subscribe to several different services.
What do the best stock research websites and tools have in common? They all offer access to premium content sources within a streamlined, centralized platform.
Semantic Search
Perhaps the most important application of AI in stock and investment research tools is semantic search: the capability to deliver search results that exactly match your keyword directly and those that match your intent.
One of the only investment research tools offering this capability is AlphaPro via proprietary Smart Synonyms™ technology. This technology delivers results for your exact search terms and synonyms of your search terms while screening out incorrect results for words with multiple meanings.
For instance, A search for “ESG investing” on the AlphaPro platform will include results for similar relevant terms, such as “socially responsible investing” and “impact investing.”
Instead of having to run several separate queries, often using different terms, smart search tools know exactly what you are looking for and bring it to your attention in one search.
Real-Time Alerts and Monitoring
The investment world, like the market, has moved much faster today than ever before. The technology-driven speed of doing business and the amount of available data today make it a must for investors to know current market trends, company updates, and any other real-time data and news.
The catch: doing this task practically is nearly impossible on their own.
Stock and investment research platforms work for you in ways that save you huge chunks of time and fight the fear of missing out on something important.
With real-time alerts, you get automated, instantaneous notices for the stocks, companies, products, industries, or themes most meaningful to you. No wonder the best stock research tools give users control over the frequency and method of delivery of their alerts.
Watchlists and customized dashboards centralize alerts and information about stocks, companies, or industries in one place. This allows investors to see a single snapshot of the most important insights.
Sentiment Analysis
Broker research, annual reports, and call transcripts are often dozens of pages long. It takes hours to read through them manually, let alone garner the overall tone behind the discussion it includes.
Powered by NLP technology, sentiment analysis doesn’t just bring you the right results for your search and an idea of how the market feels about the company, product, trend, or event you’re researching. Investment research tools do this in varying ways.
For instance, AlphaPro applies color-coded analysis that shows the user what the document says about it. An algorithmic sentiment score is also calculated, which measures the positive and negative tone of a document and/or the overall set of search results and how it’s changed over time.
Generative AI
Generative AI, or genAI, has been a storm in the past few years, changing many industries and work streams. Regarding investment research, the generative artificial intelligence approach opens profound possibilities, removes unnecessary time-consuming manual tasks, leads to more profound insight analysis and accuracy, and thus results in faster research.
That’s why investors are increasingly relying on genAI-powered tools like AlphaPro to improve and speed up their research. Still, this genAI model should be trained specifically on financial and business data, have guardrails against hallucinations, and generate citable data for ease of reference and greater security.
A suite of business-grade insights built on over ten years of AI tech development, AlphaPro includes industry-leading generative AI across a range of tools. Some of the most notable include our approach with retrieval-augmented generation and our proprietary AlphaPro Large Language Model, ASLLM, trained explicitly on data about business and finance that beats or matches leading third-party LLMs on over 90% of occasions.
Intuitive Data Export Capabilities
Data available with any stock and investment tool is most useful when you can export it and combine it into your existing work stream. Data extraction also helps in transposing information and allows usable details to be applied in financial modeling.
The top platforms, such as AlphaPro, make it easy to export those findings to places where you can further analyze your formulas or build charts and other visuals. When AI can surface insights in seconds, your reports, decks, and memos can practically write themselves.