Earnings season
This might be bit of a naive question but I had been struggling with this and hope to find help from experienced professionals.
During earnings season, I had been struggling to keep pace with reading through all the earnings call transcripts. Reading one transcript takes around 30 minutes to 1 hour for me and then I had to read some old transcripts too to make sense of some trends or changes. So one company earnings take around 2-3 hours atleast for me and this is just data gathering. Then I use this data to put out some insights.
Is this process in terms of effort and time consumed common practice in the industry? Is time of the essence here for a hedge fund to make investment decisions or to update their strategy? If yes, then how does a hedge fund get the analysis done fast? Are there any tools/platforms to help on the analysis front?
A big part of this is how well you’re prepared for the season.
If you know your companies, KPIs, trends, narratives, management teams, etc. you should be able to speed read and get the gist (plus your call back with management and/or sell side).
I find writing out the themes and such to look for (with context from numbers/transcripts) and then keeping that list up as I skim a helpful practice.
So when you are reading through transcripts, you only look for particular themes that you are interested in? But what if there might be some new themes that might come up. How do you find that?
It’s less about that and more about feeling comfortable speed reading through filler in the prepared remarks and knowing which questions of the Q&A are ok to fly through
How fast do you read? The avg human can achieve full comprehension at around 1000wpm if you train.
yeah, I'm curious on this too. I was at a large LO so had an associate helping pulling all the numbers into model.
I was wondering if you were to do all this yourself at HF, how much time do you budget for each company post earnings announcement and what's your day / week like? (i.e. how many companies can you do a day / a week, etc?)
Have you ever explored tools like Daloop and Canalyst for pulling numbers into models?
Frankly I never use those (even though I pay for them) because it takes less time (less than 15 min or so) to manually update my spreadsheet than it does for them to be ready to update the print on excel (about 25 minute). It takes about 1 minute to update a column on each financial... the 8k/presser may also include adjustments etc. which would take the update time from 3-5 minutes to 5-10 minutes.
Following
So the time per company per earnings is about 1-2 hours. However, this assumes you already had an earnings preview (~1 hour), already cover the stock (1-2 hours per week at min), and did initiation already (10-40 hours upfront).
Quite insightful, thanks!
When you say - "I'm really paying attention to the critical factors (theme's I've developed prior), guidance, and commentary around margins, supply/demand outlook, etc" - are you looking for sentiments, or any other subjective metrics?
Also, if you are looking for specific factors, do you use some search tools or use chatGPT to get the exact data ?
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