OneNote Users?

I'm interested in hearing how equity analysts or anyone involved in equity research organizes their notes, preferably using OneNote. I am a generalist on the buy-side covering 3 sectors, so I keep sector level notes as well as company specific notes. After 2+ years my OneNote notebook has become bloated and I am thinking there are better strategies out there to stay organized. My current system is:

  • Section for each sector. Another section for macro and special topics (Election, Brexit...)

  • Within each section is a page for sector notes, a page for potential buys/sells (notes on screening process or desirable factors...) with subpages for each specific company, then also a single page for each company currently held in a portfolio.

For each company page I have experimented with different formats and found the best method so far is to keep: PM summary thesis, valuation, risks, critical factors, earnings notes, archived notes as fixed sections.

I'm curious if anyone else could share their method? Does anyone use the tags feature? Is there a better program?

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I have been using OneNote for about a year now so I am still relatively new to it but this is how I do it. I only cover one sector so I split it up by company. Also, I don't know if there is a more efficient way to do this so I'd like to hear what others think as well.

What I have done is created a OneNote template with the following tabs: Company History, 10-Ks, Proxies, Conferences, Earnings Calls, Sellside, Management/IR calls, Modeling, Scorecard, All Other, Key Takeaways. The template is saved as a folder, so I copy and paste the folder to the folder for whatever company I'm working on and rename the folder company XYZ notes. That essentially creates a new notebook for every company. Within the tabs I'll create different pages for the year of whatever document or date of whatever conversation I had and keep track that way. Every company I work on has its own folder within our internal drive and I organize those into folders by industry group.

I've found using this templated approach in OneNote has really increased my efficiency and makes it easier to compare and contrast previous notes. Before I really just had a long running word file with titles and dates breaking it up and really the older notes were useless because it was too scattered or too much to CTRL F through. Curious to see how others use OneNote or if there is a different platform that people use.

 

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