Investment Process Improvement: The podcast discusses the integration of AI and expert calls into the investment research process, highlighting their role in enhancing efficiency and decision-making.
AI Tools: AlphaSense and Tigus are emphasized for their AI capabilities, which allow investors to search through vast data sources, including expert call libraries, to gain unique insights.
Expert Calls: The use of expert calls is highlighted as a significant improvement in the research process, providing access to industry insights that were previously costly and less accessible.
Disruptive Innovations: The conversation identifies expert call libraries and AI as disruptive innovations that have transformed investment research by lowering costs and expanding access to information.
AI and Expert Calls Synergy: The synergy between AI and expert calls is noted as a powerful combination, enabling investors to quickly analyze and extract valuable insights from large volumes of data.
AlphaSense Features: Specific tools like the AI chat and grid features in AlphaSense are discussed for their ability to streamline research and provide detailed analyses of companies and market conditions.
Continuous Learning: The importance of staying updated with new AI tools and features is emphasized, with suggestions to engage with account managers and product managers to maximize the use of platforms like AlphaSense.
Investment Decision-Making: While AI aids in data analysis and research, the ultimate investment decisions still rely on human judgment, underscoring the combination of human expertise and technological tools.
Transcript
You're about to listen to the yet another value podcast with your host me, Andrew Walker. Today's episode is I This is a follow-up to the podcast I did with Ardam Finan, my friend, on perfecting the investment process. This is a webinar that we did on AlphaSense. We talk a lot about using AI and expert calls in the research process, using them for improvement, all that sort of stuff. This was behind a payw wall for AlphaSense, but they said after a month, hey, we're getting good reviews. why don't you put it out on the podcast and try and get more listenership and let you know we want the we want this to be out there. So I think you're really going to enjoy it. I hope you do. I'll include a link to the prior perfecting the investment process uh podcast with Ardum in the show notes which was one of to be frank one of the most popular podcasts I've ever done. We got tons of great feedback on it. So I think you're really going to like that podcast. I think you'll really enjoy this podcast if you like that podcast. So we're going to get all there in a second but first a word from our sponsors. Today's episode is sponsored by AlphaSense. Look, over the years, you've heard me talk about it non-stop. AlphaSense, Tigus, they've become core to how I do investment research. They they've got a burgeoning set of AI tools. They've got the expert calls, which I absolutely love. The expert call library. They've got over, as they tell me, over 500 million premium sources from company filings, broker reports, news, trade journals, everything. Plus the expert calls, they put it all in one place. Their AI tools let you search unique data sources in really interesting ways. This October they're hosting their first ever Alpha Summit 2025 in Brooklyn. I'll be dropping in and out. So the event will feature all sorts of lead leaders from finance, UBS, Wells Fargo, Assenture, Google, who's who are going to be there sharing how AI is reshaping the investment research and decision-making landscape. Uh what's going to make special is it's just not just about the ideas. It's about really talking about how AI can improve workflows and the strategies that top firms are using right now. So I'd love to see you there. If you're going, you can join me there. AlphaSense, Alphasummit 2025, October 6th through 8th at the refinery at the Domino. You can sign up at alphasense.comyavp. That's alpha-sense.comyavp. All right. Hello and welcome to the uh I I guess it's just the Alphasense user webinar with me, Andrew Walker, the host of Yet Another Value podcast, and my good friend Ardum Poken. He is the head of Caracon Capital. Artem, how's it going? >> Hi, Andrew. Great seeing you again. >> Look, Artem, let me I well, let's just start. Disclaimer, nothing on this webinar is investing advice. I don't think we're talking specific stocks, but we might dive into some like real-time examples. So, people should remember that. And I'm sure AlphaSense will do disclaimers out the wazu. Look, I I'll set the stage and then we can dive into everything. We were talking to the people at Alphasense. So, we are both users, subscribers, whatever you want to call it. I think we both find huge amounts of value from the product. I think we find huge amounts of value in different pieces of the product. AlphaSense and Tigus are like they've got everything at this point. But we said it and they said, "Hey, why don't you guys come on and do a webinar talking about uh you know, we just did a podcast talking about I don't think it was quite process improvement, but our process as investors." And a lot of that for me personally, a lot of the process improvements for me over the past 10 years has been adopting AI into my investing process and adopting expert calls into my investing process. I was already doing a little but you know both have ramped up and both of them have ramped up materially in large part thanks to Tikas AlphaSense and the tools and you know the expert call library network and everything. So we told them about that all that sort of stuff and like hey why don't you guys get on talk about using AI in your process talking about using expert calls in your process talk about how you use alpha for process. That's the overall idea for this webinar. An hour of us talking about all of that. Would you add anything to that or anything else people should feel like they're going to get from this hour of the webinar? >> I think the theme of the both our prior conversation on yet another value podcast and today's verbina is the same theme improving and perfecting our craft as investors. So I stand behind that. Obviously, when you and I were talking on the public, so to speak, podcast, we were speaking more broad themes as opposed to concrete specific tools of the trade. We were talking about how to use a hammer to hit on a nail or whatever other tool you may be using. Here we will probably be talking a little bit more about okay how do you choose a hammer or any other tool or how do you use it and how you're changing your use cases. So I think probably this conversation I'm more likely to be more specific. So I'll be sharing some of my examples and use cases. You may throw some of yours. So I'm really looking forward but the theme is I think it is the same. I I I think you're exactly correct and I I think the way we're going to structure this is we're going to talk about expert using expert calls using AI and then as we continue that dive deeper and deeper and narrow into the how if people are listening to this and are subscribed to Alpha Centigus how they can use specific Alpha Centigus tools to uh in their process as we dive deeper and deeper. So let me just start off. I made a contention in there that I I'd love for you to push back on, agree with, disagree with. Over the past 10 years, I think the biggest change and improvement in my process has been, you know, when I was at McKenzie or when I was at Bane Capital, we would do expert calls all the time. But when you switch from a place kind of with approaching unlimited resources to being, let's just call it more individual investor, small solo practitioner, whatever it is, you lost that access to, hey, I want to learn this company. I I'm going to go do 20 expert calls and spend a thousand bucks an expert call. or you know you didn't have 15 analysts to go summarize uh everything that's ever been written in a research report. I think the biggest process improvement has been expert call libraries. So you can get access to basically unlimited amounts of expert calls for extreme for an annual subscription. That's new over the past 10 years. And then AI, it can summarize 20 earnings reports. So you don't need 10 analysts under you to like kind of get summaries of big uh earnings report. Would you agree with that contention? Would you disagree? How have you kind of thought about those just two overall process improvements over the past 10 years? >> I wouldn't necessarily call them process improvements per se. I keep using that term and you keep pushing back on me. I would call them disruptive innovation that came to the investment research space and in terms of pro in terms of tools that I use those meaning expert call libraries and bespoke expert calls because the price drop dramatically as you pointed out with the advent of tigus and stream mosaic alpha sense again I will use the alpha sense and tigus interchangeably because Now it's under the same umbrella and we don't need to trace exact corporate history. Those load the cost and the library again technological innovation network effect that was built by connecting creators and readers and by the way you can be both creator and read at the same time that usually expands the total addressable market and lowers the cost. Because of that you convert a pure variable cost model into semi semi-fix semivariable that would led to the expansion of entire time and use k and usage of expert calls in my opinion. I haven't seen the data obviously but that's my guess and I think I'm fairly confident that I'm right about that. So those were two disruptive innovations. people may bring in some credit card data or alternative data that are still very very very very expensive and we don't use that much of credit card and we don't use credit card data and our alternative data is pretty simple such as Google trends by the way Alpha Sense maybe you figure out how to build something and lower the cost in that vertical as well but for me personally expert code libraries and advanti were two biggest disruptive innovation in the environment that I've been implementing into my process. >> I agree. Let's dive into expert calls. So, the reason I want to start I think AI is a little buzzier and I think AI like everyone should and should be experienced with AI tools, but I want to start with expert calls because I I I think that you're a tool that bluntly wielded can be useful, but I think the finer you kind of like sharpen that sword, I think that it's like a force multiplier in terms of the effectiveness of expert calls. And I mean that both for reading expert call libraries, reading expert call transcripts, but especially for conducting expert interviews. Like I know you and I have done some together before. I've been on calls with other people. When I'm on an expert call with someone who's really good versus someone who, you know, someone who's really good, someone who's super prepared versus someone who might be doing it by the seat of the bank, I'm just always impressed by how much more I learn and everything. So I I just want to stop there. how do you use expert calls and then we can start diving into the different ways to use them and everything. Okay, so as I joke most of my time I spent either listening or reading. So and if you use these two modalities unsurprisingly these are two use cases for expert calls. I either listen meaning I conduct a bespoke expert call or I read a certain number of calls that are already in the library and that number can well if there are already a lot of calls the number what I am reading can vary from just a few because maybe there are not that many and I think the record one was probably 70 calls across uh tus and alpha sense that I that I've read and I did probably five or six of my own as well and I literally read 70 calls. Since then the number has only gone up now. It's probably up to 100 or so and I literally read all of them and that was a lot of fun because the business was sufficiently complex and by the way I could mention the business to put things in perspective. It's a IWG the hybrid working flex space provider that does operations globally. Full disclaimer Kraken Capital LLC and all its affiliates are loan the shares of IWG. This is not investment advice or recommendation to buy or sell any securities. So I'm just giving it for context. The business is complex and had a long history and a lot of evolution and lots of moving pieces. So my first thinking was I'll do five expert calls and I'll figure this out. Did five bespoke expert calls. Did not figure anything out. back to square one like okay I guess I need to read these 70 calls and then I methodically read all of them but both on IWG and we work because it's a very close P and when you study the industry you want to study several players if they exist and that was incredibly educational for me and informative and now many things that come up like yeah I know the answer I've read this call and someone in the industry or a client mentioned this it was mentioned two or three years ago but the same rational that's applicable today. So I love reading those things and I also love doing my own. In fact, what often excites me when I research a company is when I log in into Alpha Sense, I put the ticker and I and I choose that I want to get search results only for expert calls and it shows zero calls or one or two calls. It means that probably nobody really looked at it and that's for me is an opportunity to learn more about this in company that I perceive as an interesting investment opportunity and deepen my research tremendously compared to probably what is out there where let me a lot of questions but let me start with one just like sourcing of experts. So, uh, I run the yet another value podcast. And one thing I've started doing recently is I've actually started trying to do a an expert call on every company before I have the before I do the podcast on the company. You know, it's a idea focused podcast for those who haven't listened one hour long. You can listen to it, you can. It doesn't matter. But I I've started trying to do an expert call on every company before I do the podcast so that I have more informed questions, more interesting insights, all that sort of stuff. But one thing that's jumped out to me is like, you know, some podcasts it's so obvious who I want to do the expert call on. You know, you're doing uh a company that has one 80% customer. Guess what? I want to talk to somebody who works at the 80% customer and get their insights into the company. You know, you're doing a company that's got a a new drug. I want to talk to a doctor who's prescribing the drug. Ask them how they're viewing it. Ask them how they're seeing. Some companies, you know, I would use as a very loose example. If I was going to do an expert call on Berkshire Hathaway, what the heck expert call would I do, right? It's this conglomerate that is basically Warren Buffett and like a former wouldn't really help. Charlie Mer rest in peace, but he wouldn't even talk to me. But like I wouldn't do a former. It's really a culture con. And I say that because consolation software like what that is a rollup of uh you know software businesses focused on municipal governments if I remember their core uh focus correctly. What is what am I going to do with constellation software if I'm going to talk to an expert? Like it's literally a hundred different small companies rolled up together. Uh there are several other ones, but I I strugg with that. So when do you know if an expert company an expert call works for a company, works for an investment thesis versus maybe doesn't like the Berkshire Hathway example. >> Okay, great question. Before I answer that, let me just clarify something that what you probably meant to say. I think he was saying that if a if a company has a very large customer, you may want to talk to the customer. I think what you meant to say is that you want to talk to a former employee of that very large customer. >> Yes. Yes, you are exactly >> because from compliance perspective talking to a big customer is not prudent or smart. You are right. The compliance people will hop on and and I want to be very clear, Alpha Sense has fantastic compliance team who is very thoughtful, very diligent, conservative in a good way conservative and they would not source an expert which could present a compliance or legal issue. So in Andrew's example, the right way to go about it will be find someone who left that customer a year ago. >> Yes. who may understand the product, understand the process, understand the relationship, but that person has no information that may restrict the investor. >> Yes. And then again, AlphaSense team fantastic on that sense. And by the way, that's another great thing about using AlphaSense uh call expert library or asking to organize calls by AlphaSense. there is a record that has been reviewed by compliance team and you know that you're you're clear you're good that's another again it's it's not what you asked but it was very pertinent point you make right now okay going back to the heart of your question is uh sourcing expert calls remember our conversation about golf and different cs >> yes >> yesterday so you need to use a and by the way for those who didn't listen our prior conversation. I do not play golf unfortunately. So, but the analogy which I used yesterday was that for different situations you use different tools. Similar in golf, for different terrain, you use different cups. Otherwise, you're not going to do well at golf. So, here's the same. This is how I approach it. Usually, you figure out the key ingredients for success of your investment thesis. For example, if your idea is based on product superiority that the company has launched six months ago and you believe that this product is massively superior to everything else out there, maybe it's safer, maybe it's cheaper, maybe it's more efficient. You know, people in Silicon Valley like to to say like, "Oh, this is 10x better or 10x cheaper." Now 10x is a more of a figurative way to describe that. It may not necessarily the 10x better but it should be better very substantial. In that case you need to focus I would want to focus all my research efforts on that product and understand customer perspective both people who already using that superior product people who switched people who have not switched but tried and people who didn't even bother learn out about the product and understand what's stopping them that's one example another example there may be a thesis which is based okay product is fantastic I got comfortable with that In business, there are two problems as my Stanford business school professor joked. You know those problems? >> Problem number one, not enough sales. Problem number two, everything else. >> Okay, so you got the product. Can the company sell tons of that product or service? Do they have a wellestablished sales motion, an incredibly running sales machine or not? Guess what? In that case, I will want to talk to former salespeople. What's the sales process is like the there is another company that Karakan Capital Ly and all its affiliates own called Softwave Softwave Medical listed in Israel. Again, this is not investment advice. So, in my opinion, based on my research, they have superior product and you can ask me later how I got to that conclusion and why it's superior, etc., etc., but I also wanted to understand the sales process. So Also Sans helped me source a former salesperson and I spoke with him for now and I literally asked him could you role play with me your conversation imagine I am a doctor dermatologist you came to my office we shake hands and I ask you why you're here why you taking my time away from my schedule and from my patients. Let's go through that. And we literally borderline did a role play probably for 20 minutes overall over the course of entire hour. And then I was asking different other questions. That's incredibly helpful to understand how these sales happen because sometimes it's very easy when you are in our Excel or notion or Microsoft Word whatever we use it's very easy to think that sales just happen but sales just don't happen. someone needs to sell it like everything which is in my office here has been somehow sold to me. So, and I think understanding sales process is one of the most incredible things like overall I believe that if someone by the way like if so I'm in my early 40s if I look back of my life I wish I spent six months in sales in something ideally B2B just to understand the process and psychological challenges of that and how it works. I think it would have made me a better investor. Now I'm in my early 40s. I'm not going to go back and get the job, but the best I can do is either talk to people who are in sales and learn from them or read expert collaboratories about sales process and how it works. >> You know, so I'm going to keep I think you will know the company I'm talking about. I'm going to keep it anonymized intentionally, but one really interesting example I I've seen recently is there's a company and they have an FDA approved study that says their uh let's just call it device defective rate is 1%. And all of their FDA all of their peers are last generation products and it's 10%. So when you see that you would say, "Oh my god, this product is literally 10x better." You you chose 10x 10x and these defects are they're pretty bad. you know, it's an FD, it's an implant device. If you have a defect, it's there's another surgery at minimum required, right? So, you read that and you say, "Oh my god, this is a 10x better product." And it's so interesting when you do expert calls on this company, when you talk to salespeople about how they're selling it to people using that using that, hey, this product is 10x better. Do you really want to take the uh medical malpractice risk of putting this putting a different product in when this product's 10% better? Versus when you talk to doctors and then you hear doctors and you say, "Hey, I'm reading an FDA study that says this product is 1% defect rate versus other lastg products at 10%. Why are you still using a 10% lastg product?" And they say, "Hey, the last gen products were only were all of the FDA studies were done in the '9s. Guess what? There have been huge process improvements and huge improvements in surgical techniques since then. We think that the last gen products are just as safe as the current gen products and we've got our own evidence in our surgery specs up. So, it's just it's really interesting. You know, you hear the company spin and then you can use the expert calls to dive in and hear how the Salesforce is using it and maybe if the if the customer in this case the surgeons are buying it or not buying it. I I have more questions on expert calls, but I think that's a really interesting anonymized example I tried to give. I'll pause there and let you just comment on any piece or if they that comment on that again uh on on a company that we own and it has FDA clearances. It's very interesting. I asked probably six, seven, eight doctors and they they and I asked them. So again, I'm talking about soft wave here, right? I'm still box. >> We still loan the shares. Nothing changed in the last five minutes. So they have almost 10 I think it's I believe at number nine. So let's let's round it to 10 for the sake of simplicity as the clearances for various indications. And as far as I understand based on my research and conversations by alpha science almost nobody else has as many. So then ask doctors doctor wave has this number of clearances and that device doesn't or has only one or two do your doctor care and interestingly I receive a fairly broad range of responses some people care because they say my liability if something goes down is a lot lower the risk of that because I was using an FD clear device point indication that was clear for me. It gives more comfort. I like that on the other extreme and I will skip all the shades between those two extremes. Someone may say, "I don't really care. I'm really good at what I do. I can use it off label. I'm super confident doctor. I don't care." For me, it's just a marketing bus. I don't care. That's a range of opinions. And that's again something that I've gotten more comfortable as over the years as I've done many many many many expert calls is that sometimes there will be no one answer because different customers may have different opinions and that's okay because some probably I was obviously less experienced back then and I was in general and less experienced in conducting expert calls. You go and you expect like you ask a question and every single doctor in our example will give you the same answer. >> Yes. Yes. >> Great. I got it. It's certain. Nothing is certain. Different people have different opinions and that's okay. But it's incredibly helpful to understand the broad range of opinions and incorporate them into your thinking about the investment thesis whatever that thesis is. >> Let me go back. So you mentioned when you were talking about softwave talking to a former salesperson and formers are actually the the discussions I have the hardest time with because most formers by definition have left the company and I find that they can >> I think it's not always I think it's everybody left the company otherwise they're not former >> by definition that's why I said by definition they've left the company uh they many of the most of the time the formers leave not I I don't know if it's most time but a lot of the formers I talked to have left through a layoff especially now you know on the heels of the 2022 like kind of the all the growth stocks going through a round of cost cutting a round of fat trimming a lot of the formers left through layoffs and I find sometimes it is hard to cut through the bitterness of having left from a layoff versus how the the customers actually treat it or sometimes the person loved being at the place uh was wildly successful left and they've got nothing to say but great things about the company and then you look and like the company's kind of going up in flames and you're like oh well it's hard to marry them. So I I I want to ask like how do you kind of separate the bias of a former whether it's positive or negative versus what you're learning in the call because I just find they can be such double-edged swords when you talk to them. >> It's difficult. Um let me ask you this before I answer the question. >> As far as I know you're married. I know your wife's name. I think you mentioned it publicly. I will say her name is Alicia. So, okay. Fantastic. Uh, have you had uh girlfriends before you married? >> Art, are you trying to get me in trouble here, bro? >> No, no, I'm not. I hope >> I might might have had one or two. >> Okay. So, I'm hoping that if someone calls them and asks, "Is Andrew a good human being?" they will probably say that you're a good human being, even though you're not together anymore. So I think formers is a little bit the same. And by the way may be formers for variety of reasons. Not all of them got laid off. Some of them got a better career option. >> Yes, >> they accepted the offer. They moved on. There is no really there is not much bitter feelings in that case. There will be some thoughts. But where I'm leaving with my question about your dating history, Alicia, I'm really sorry. I hope I will not get and ender into trouble. So is I think how the company would treat a former employee if that employee was dismissed whether fired or laid off doesn't really matter. It also tells you a lot about the company culture. I think one of the best indic indicators about indirect evidence about culture that I've had with formers is when a person will honestly tell me there was a round of of lay offs unfortunately I was let go I think it's a great company it's unfortunate and then you ask them if they call you tomorrow and say hey business is doing better we need more people we love you we're sorry that you had to leave. Would you like to come back? And many people say, "Oh, yeah." Some people say no. Some people say yes. That's a telling sign. Similarly, would you recommend your brother or sister or a nephew or a niece to work there? It tells you something about the culture. Now, it's only one piece of evidence. And again, you and I spoke about this yesterday. We are in the business of making judgment and decisions. So similarly in this case when we talk to any expert we need to make a judgment about their credibility and it's not always easy often it's difficult you know what I was doing before I went to business school right in my prior professional life >> yes >> okay what I was doing before that >> you you were a tax lawyer >> yeah I was a lawyer right so now in law there is this concept of preponderance of evidence so I and some of those frameworks from my legal days. I think I still use them as a mental frameworks in my investing. So I think prepundonderance of evidence would be one of those. I cannot establish with certainty that what 10 experts customers for employees industry consultants whoever told me is true. I don't know. They may be lying possible. They may be telling me the truth, what they believe is truth, but they're simply wrong. It it could happen. All of us are human beings. But what you're trying to do, you're trying to build a case that way where there is a very high chance supported by that prepundonderance of evidence that this would be a good investment to make based on your thesis. Can I let me >> Can you ever get to beyond the reasonable doubt which is the standard in criminal proceedings? Probably not in investing unfortunately. But could you get at least to prepundonderance of evidence kind of more likely than not standard? I think so. That's what we're trying to do. Let me I I like what you said. You're never like it would be awesome if we could interview 5,000 forformers at every company and like really build a database and be like oh yeah there were 20 who were upset but 4,980 didn't this is a great company you know in terms of extremes right I've done calls before and I'm thinking of a specific company with three formers right and this was a smaller company so three formers is a a large percentage of their farmers two of them were happy had good things to say and one of them, you know, was one star review would have been too high, right? They it was as little as they could go. They were this was the worst place in the world. Uh now all of these guys had left through layoffs and I don't know like the guy who I was interviewing, he was there for nine months. You know, he might have been surprised by the layoff. It was a pretty miserable experience. But I just wonder how do you weigh the extremes? Whether it's my example where there's one person who is unbelievably bitter or you know sometimes I'll do calls and three people are meh you know company's fine wouldn't go back but no no bad words to say and one person is over the moon do you you know in investing extremes are what makes much of an investing career so do you weigh extremes more less how do you think about that >> I need context I cannot apply in general without reading those those transcripts and making a specific judgment call. That's number one. Number two, you also get other data points. For example, this is my frame of reference which may be incorrect, but I believe that generally generally companies with crappy culture and unhappy employees do not make great products. Usually it means that if I'm seeing that the company has really crappy product and one out of three employees in your example was unhappy and speaks very negatively with one star review will be too generous. I'm more likely to believe the expert testimony. Let's use that word. While if the company is shipping great products and has happy happy customers who are enthusiastic about the product or service, I'm probably less likely to put more weight on the unhappy former employee. And by the way, all of us have this type of experience. Few years ago, I invested that's not a current position. I invested in a health care service company and healthcare service company broadly defined it was more on the dealing with insurance company let's say so and I spoke with few formers and one of them was very very negative but when you look at his specific lines and what he said and you match it with management commentary you match it with what other people are saying you get to the conclusion that he's probably off base and too emotional and too unhappy and he's not really supporting it by facts. And then there is another thing which here which is important is the art of asking follow-up questions. If someone says like company culture is horrible, it's horrendous. It's toxic. You're very interesting to hear. I'm so glad you said that. Could you give me an example? And then if you get one example, then you ask for another example. You keep digging. Like think about it. You put that person on the witness stand and you're trying to get respect in their confidentiality agreements and NDAs and everything else. Of course, you try to get what is behind. And if they give you examples that for you seem totally toxic, yeah, maybe there's a problem. If they cannot come up with any tangible things and it's all big words, they probably have credible. That's great on expert calls. And again, the reason I want to start there is because I I mean at this point, you and I have talked about I I do an expert call week. I probably read at transcript like I I I find them to be hugely helpful tools and I I just the more you apply them to investing just even in terms of if you're following a company calling a customer a different customer once a month once a quarter whatever it is and asking them or asking them hey you're buying this product what do you think and obviously within all compliance rules every what do you think like it's just really interesting to continue to build that mosaic and if people aren't doing it I I I think you're getting left behind and it's one of the few areas where you can build kind of mosaic information that is going to be pretty unique to you. Any last thoughts on expert calls or can I start switching over to AI? >> I have I have a few ones on on expert calls. So, first screening questions screen questions alone can be fantastic source of value. >> Yes. So what I usually do I always design my own expert calls and ask the team could you ask this call these questions okay I never ask anything about the career history because that will be available in bio you don't want to waste a screening question on that because you cannot ask 20 of them you ask like three or four so that's number one number two I always try to understand what that person was doing dayto day sometimes it's pretty obvious sometimes it's less obvious so that's what I try to understand I try to ask questions of two types it can be either open-ended and I'm hoping that expert will write two three four sentences and sometimes you learn a lot from those sentences alone and some questions I might ask and this is more applies for a very when you look for a proverbial needle in in a hashtag you ask them rate me you give them several areas of business like marketing sales supply chain management etc procurement etc etc and then you ask them rate your knowledge of each of them on based on the scale of 1 to 10 and what ideally you want to do you want to see lot of ones and twos and one or two 8 n 10 because it would mean that the expert is honest and not exaggerating their expertise Because if they show I can talk about sales and technology and product management and marketing probably they know nothing unless they will see you but if they say marketing sorry I have no idea but supply chain management n out of 10 I'm very knowledgeable I was blah blah blah that was my tal was doing that's that's very different game so then also when I read a lot of expert I read a lot of expert calls as you and I discussed And sometimes it's very clear that people are uh people who conduct them ask questions that it's very clear almost in advance that the expert will not be able to answer. Like for example, do not ask salesperson about accounting or do not discuss with marketing person why stock why stockbased compensation is so high. they they wouldn't know unless they accounting junkie and study accounting textbooks for fun on Saturdays and Sundays. So you need to calibrate that. Now sometimes I get it you may have a call for an hour it's 40 minutes in you ask all your questions you kind of realize that expert maybe not as good as you hoped which happens and then you just okay let me ask everything else. It it could happen. But sometimes I see like, oh my god, why they asking this? They they should have followed up on this. So, and I'm sure I made I made my own mistakes. I'm not saying I'm perfect whatsoever. That's a continuous improvement, but that's another uh common mistake. And then one use case that I wanted to highlight on our prior investment at Karakan Capital and we don't own shares anymore is a company called Crocs. the the way I joke then those very interestingly looking shoes. So this is the stage. Let me set that set up the stage. As far as I remember summer 2022, Crox is trading probably at five and a half maybe six times earnings for 2022 and it's already some let's say June. Okay, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that either the company is going out of business soon in the next few years or it's horribly mispriced. And what happened? Crocs had tremendous uplift in sales during co and the key question was is it just another co beneficiary and it's all going to collapse? By collapse I don't mean the settle stock price. It was already down horribly. I'm talking about fundamental performance or whether it's not. How do you figure this out? It's very difficult. And what we did, I spoke with several former employees and they pulled and some of them left even before CO. But they shared with me all those internal changes that the company has made before CO and then CO probably helped with the whole stay and very casual wearing casual trend. Sure. But the company built such a fantastic based on my research I can be mistaken foundation that they were able to take advantage of those coded tailwinds and that foundation is probably not disappearing and that was very valuable learning but again that was almost a history guide. Look that what happened in 17 that what happened in 18 this was the change we got the new markets in person we changed this we changed that etc etc. That was an incredible tutorial in the history. It's almost like you're traveling to, I don't know, big France, uh, to see some castles from medieval times and you get a local guide with a major in history. Guess what? They will tell you a lot of valuable things that you would not discover otherwise. That's the analogy. Let's that was great and I actually have following questions but I I I want to be cognizant of time on the webinar and everything and I want to move on to talking about AI and I'd love to just start you know broadly we can dive into alphaent specific tools and I do want to talk about alpha specific tools since this is an alpha webinar and everything but just broadly what how have you been incorporating AI into your your process how how are you kind of using them what tools are you using >> okay so I think this is where we stopped yesterday so the way I think about uh The usage of AI in my investing process is across the line of the framework that I've heard from Paul Enright on one of his podcast. I believe it was podcast with Patans on Invest like the best. If I'm wrong then it was in capital allocators. So and he breaks it into digging, analyzing deciding and it's very simple. There are three stages. It's not this is the flowchart diagram with with 100 boxes. It's pretty simple but I found it's effective in general and especially when I think about AI. So I think and then I break it where AI for me is delivering most productivity boost and it's mostly in a little bit and analyzing so far zero in deciding and this is my view as of August 6 I believe today. So it could change in the future as technology evolves, as I evolved. So that's number one. Number two, simplistically we can break usage of AI into can you do something with AI that you used to do but it will save you a lot of time versus can you do something with AI that you would that you were never able to do. I figured out many use cases for the first one. I have not figured out use cases for the second one yet. I hope I will. So on digging AI provides productivity boost in many ways and I will walk you through some use cases and again as I mentioned yesterday I feel that AI and expert collaborates were a match made in heaven. So now I can be using AI as a core research copilot. I'll give you an example. I met a company at a conference in May the Riley conference was interesting group meeting came away thinking that maybe an interesting company to research. Got back home few days later pull out of some DIC writeups just to get what the thesis has been. I start reading it the write up says this company operates in 10 states. Okay, there are 50 states in the nation. They still have 40 states left. At least based on roughly two years ago, but did it change? It has been two years. Maybe now they in 30 or 50 or 60. Okay, not 60. 60 wouldn't be too much. 50. So like I don't know. In the old days, what I would need to do, I would need to open my notion file, type there question list which I have in the template, and type how many states is this company currently operating. And then I will need to go open 10K and look for it. etc., etc. Now what I do, I have my PDF file with VIC write up or VIC itself on one screen. I have alpha sense on another. I pull out AI assistant. I ask how many states is the company currently operating? Also, could you please provide the history of how the number of states changed over the years and any other relevant information such as revenue breakdown by state or group of state or whatever. I know 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 8 seconds, I get an answer. I quickly read and I know, okay, since then they expanded to this number of states and they got core states or legacy states. This is where most revenue comes from and they got new states, but they still ramping up, etc., etc. Like, fantastic. I don't need to write this question down anymore. And then remember to check 10K and go. So that's my research copilot need. >> I love that. I'm I'm completely with you just in terms of the use cases of summarizing or I know I want to go to the uh I I want to go to the past three proxies and see how incentive comp has changed over time and that used to be like I'm pretty fast but that used to be a multi-hour process right you have to open three proxies scroll through them really compare read like these companies don't exactly make it easy to see how much they're paying each people and why they're paying them with with any type of AI tool it's a second. It's a 10-second process. Hey, how has Incentive Comp in evolved over the past three years? Um, let let me ask specifically. So, that's that was just generic AI. Uh, I think there's really interesting to things about merging AI and expert calls, but I I think we can hit on them as we talk about what about AlphaSense specifically like they have especially over the past six to n months. Let's just talk about how are using AlphaSense specific tools because they over the past six months they've rolled out several and they're going to roll out several more and they're getting much better. So what AlphaSent specific tools are using? >> Okay. So you're right. AlphaSense is shipping bunch of new features, right? So that's fantastic. Features are getting shipped and shipped and shipped and there are more and more and more. So now I will tell you my so the the one obviously they have is the chat and the chat can work in regular chat or you can turn on deep search mode on the chat if you want something bigger output and you wanted to think longer. So that's always that's fairly similar use case to chat or perplexity or whatever general AI or what I call horizontal AI you use. My favorite personal feature of the Alpha Sense is what they call grid and you can make grid almost it's like a lag on my sound place. You can turn that grid in almost whatever you want. For example, I will give you a few example that I use. I will give you some examples that I think I would like to use but but haven't done much of it yet because of more on my investment style as opposed to limitations of alt sense because that tool is very powerful. So imagine you got Andrew calls me and says RM I have this great stock idea this is the thesis etc. Okay, I want to understand customer perspective. I go to Alpha Sense and there are 20 expert calls, most of them with customers. I got no clue which one was a good call, which one was a average call and all of them are pretty long. 20 calls to read. That's a good amount of time. And usually when I read, I also take a lot of notes and it means that my reading time actually goes up. figuring out where to focus and this goes back to digging stage is very very important. Now what I have I pre-built and this is important. Alpha sense gives you some templates you can use them but I made those templates myself that will fit my investment style and my focus and I have different templates for grid. I will have templates that is more targeted towards product. Another one will be more targeted towards company strategy, competition, risk, etc. And you can build as many as you want. If you're software as a service investor, you can build one for SARS, another one you can build for industrials or for consumer, whatever you like. There's lot of flexibility there. And grid looks exactly think about as a chessboard. There are horizontal lines and there are vertical lines. Horizontal lines. This is documents. By the way, documents can be any. It can be expert calls. You know, is this is what I'm using as my example. It can be earnings calls. It can be 10k and cues or proxies in your example Andrew in incentive compensation whatever you like and then columns will be questions and I think you can put up to 12 questions and you what is really and then you ask those questions and you see what you get in the chart and by the way that's another cool thing about alpha sense okay I'm not technologist so if alpha if a dot I describe is actually incorrect I apologize in advance but my understanding is that alpha sense Because it's a specialized vertical AI tool, it makes the prompting by user less important, less critical to get a good output because I think at the back end they kind of transform your lousy prompt into something a lot more thoughtful. Now you can still try to be thoughtful and I try to do that but that's a big advantage in my opinion of using a specialized AI tool versus generic AI tool or general AI tool such as JPT or Plexity or whatever else. So and then I got this prompt and it can be what's customer value proposition. How what made you decide to buy this product? How long will the sales cycle? What other alternatives have you considered etc etc etc. And then you click it takes a little bit of time and then you got this grid with 20 expert calls horizontally and your 12 questions vertically. And then you can read very quickly 20 answers if they were given because some of them maybe this did not come up in one question just by moving in vertical line. You just do that and then number one you got 20 points of view in just few minutes. Remember you and I spoke about doctors who may give different opinions about the same issue. Now you got the entire range of opinions within I don't know five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever it takes for you to read those. And more important, you can repeat this for all your 12 questions. But then I also figure out which expert or several of them give the most thoughtful answers. >> Yes. >> Or alternatively, I can figure out which expert call gives me yellow flags or red flags. In that case, I would go if I see two, let's say out of 20 calls, I have three with red flags or yellow flags. I will go there and then I will read myself from first page up to the last page including disclaimer and page numbers and then I will I may make a decision that given this yellow flags I'm not comfortable making this investment so I will kill my research idea alternatively I will figure out three or four or five calls that are the best and I'll go there and then I may decide is the other 15 not important or am I still okay knowing me I will still redone but it would be just to make sure that I didn't miss something because my thesis al already has been confirmed and that's a massive time boost and efficiency boost driven by I and the theme here for me human and I think I got this idea from Gary Kasparov the 13th world champion chess champion and he coined it many years ago and the premise is that human plus machine is more powerful than machine and definitely more powerful than human so that's the idea now it may always be the case. Who knows? We'll do another uh webinar in 10 years where my avatar will be talking to Andrew's avatar all powered by AI tools. And maybe I'm wrong on that premise, but that's how I approach it. The the other just I if I can Yes. And the other interesting thing I found very similar to what you said is I like to ask a question about especially when I'm new to a company. I like to ask a question in Gen Grid and then I just look through it and I see you know it labels kind of what what call the quotes are coming from and whatever call often one call will have the most quotes popping up and I'll be like oh that call is the call most likely to answer the question that I am asking. So I don't have to read 20, you know, if I want something specific on the Salesforce, I don't have to read through if there's 20 transcripts, six of them till I find, oh, here's the one that really talks about Salesforce. It's just there. And that might sound obvious, but often time it's not obvious when you're like just looking at the overall or anything. I I found that's been a great way to really speed up what what I want to focus on. And one thing uh let me ask ahead can I talk about deep research a little bit future how because I mentioned that in passing but I think it's very much worth paying attention so this is how I mostly use the deep research feature imagine I got an idea from somewhere it may be a screen it may be Andrew's podcast yet another value podcast please go and subscribe it can be a peer in my network who shared with me an interesting thesis whatever the source is I believe. So my old process would be go read 10K or go read uh several earnings calls and conference call presentations such as Morgan Stanley TNT or JP Morgan Healthcare or whatever the case could be. And I slowly build a maza in my head and it's at that point even after reading those five calls it's far from perfect because I'm trying to really put different pieces into their places. Who is the customer base? what's the segmentation? What's the pricing? It's slow plus corporate history etc. Now I also believe and this is second input for the for what I going to say as a conclusion is that think about this as reading books. If you read a book first and then you reread it three months later you will probably get a lot deeper understanding of more intricate and complex concepts second time than you did the first time. I believe same applies to reading investment materials. If my mind is not prepared to absorb a lot of information and immediately put it into a lot of right places and the right places here is the key. I will probably create a little bit mess in my head and it will will take me more time to sort it out. But how can I apply that concept of reading book first and then reading it three months later? Or a better analogy would be this. you you got a great book recommendation. You go I will go and listen to a podcast with the author for an hour get the key concepts and say okay my mind is prepared and then I will go and read the title and my level of comprehension and retention will be a lot higher. Same with here in investing what I'm trying to replicate. I will I have a prompt I have few prompts I will use for deep research feature and it's it's a pretty long prompt probably five pages and I will ask Alpha's deep research to return me a pretty detailed output which will cover a lot of my questions and then I will sit down I usually print it out because that's how I like reading. I sit down in my reading chair, get a pencil and go through that highlighting, writing something on the margins, putting stars, slammish remarks, etc. It's probably usual output is 30, 40 pages would be my guess. Similarly, it will have great sources, all references to expert calls or earnings or conference calls and then what Andrew said then you can read those that mostly most frequently cited. But after those 30 or 40 pages, my mind is prepared. It's an equivalent of listening to a podcast with an author for an hour before reading the entire 300 to 400 page book and then I will go and with prepared mind I will start reading all those primary documents or I will start with the most important ones. That's how I use deep research. Now I also want to mention the new AI feature that I think just got shipped and I have not even used it yet but I'm very curious to use it. It's I think it's AI generated expert calls with experts. So it's AI asking questions. So I haven't got a chance to test those. It's it's got released very very recently. So I did and with earning season happening right now I didn't get a chance to try it but I'm really curious. Well that actually brings me I I want to be cognizant of time because Alpha it's an Alpha webinar. It's not my podcast where we can ramble for an hour. So, but that does bring me nicely to what I thought was going to be my last question, but maybe we'll make this the second to last question. Look, it's in the same way Bloomberg was. If anyone's had a Bloomberg trend, they're always releasing features and I everyone knows they only use like 5% of the Bloomberg features. AlphaSense is releasing releasing features really quickly. I didn't even know about this expert AI transcripting and I I use Alphasense pretty this AI talking to AI transcript. Maybe I haven't seen it. Maybe I wasn't on the beta. I don't know. But how do you what have you found the best way to keep up with new tools? And look, with AI tools, many of them are much different than tools we've ever used before. So you get this new tool and you might think, oh, you know, that's free. I don't know. And it might be the most powerful tool ever released. So how are you keeping up with you can do AI broadly if you want, but I'd prefer just because this is alpha alpha in particular all the new features that they continuously roll out. uh 90 or maybe even 95% of what I know how to use AlphaSense especially on the new features and new use cases I've learned from account manager of Kakan Capital who is responsible for our account and he's incredibly helpful he okay Amar Amar Capellan shouting out to you thank you so much for teaching me everything and I apologize for asking bunch of dumb questions so thank you for your patience I've learned from my account manager I will ask oh how this feature is released would you show me how to use it? And also because I've been working with Amar for a number of years, I think he got to know my investment style and what I do and what I don't want to do reasonably well. So he will point out answer I think he will like this use case for this feature. I like oh that's great. I I I do that's fantastic. So that's number one. Number two, sometimes I will ask Amar to spend 30 minutes with me uh on Zoom and just do a regular catchup call maybe every six months, maybe every eight months and I will be asking like, "Hey, do you have any new things that you changed or improved or added or something? Could you show me?" So that's another way for me to get up to speed and know what's changing there. So that's second. And for example, Amar showed me how to use the grid and different use cases for expert calls or for earnings calls. And another cool feature for grid you can for example let's say you cover 20 consumer good companies and you're trying to figure out what they spoke about macro consumer confidence right you can pull it out into the grid I don't do it as much because I'm not necessarily like the industry specialist but it's another great use case >> I have found it's really because look every company when they pull guidance or they miss guidance or they reduce guidance they say uh what's the most common excuse consumer the consumer soft And I have found it really, really good. You read it and you know, most people do follow-up calls with management teams, not all, but most people do follow-up calls with management team 24 hours, maybe 12 hours, maybe 12 minutes after the earnings call ends. And I found it so useful to be like, "Hey, this company said the consumer was soft uh during the quarter. What did their three here's XYZ, here's their three peers, what did they say?" And then you get on the call with them and you say, "Hey, you guys said that it was soft. You know, X, Y, and Z over there, all their results were better than yours. They said the consumer's strong. They said trends were what is it about your company that the consumer is soft? Like are you guys just using an excuse? Is there something about your specific consumer and I found it's just so good. And again, that's something you can do on your own. But if you want to do that fast, you can't do that fast. It takes a lot of time. And it's great summary. And then again, if you want to dive into it, you can go and say, "Okay, X, Y, and Z. This is what the Gen Grid said. Let me go dive in and see specifically what they said." Um, last thing again, we're we're running out of time. So I want to ask, you talk to your account manager a lot. You use Office a lot. What is something I use AlphaSense a lot and I know that I'm not using all their products properly. What is one thing that you're getting a lot of value out of AlphaSense that you think maybe the average user underutilizes, doesn't realize out there? Anything? What What's one AlphaSense tool that you think would recommend for that? >> I don't necessarily know what a typical user may or may not be doing. So my best guess would be this. Over the years I've spoken with a number of product managers who are responsible for building specific features and and now I'm talking about broad features like notebook product manager or [Music] some other like broad broad features categories features not small ones. And I've spoken with a number of them over the years. And I think it's also a great way to learn about the potential use cases and potential very powerful use cases which may not be obvious to a user right away from actually the people who were running the entire process probably from ideiating to building a prototype to testing to QA to quality assurance to shipping to users that's probably the most knowledgeable planet on the person about that feature. So that's pretty cool. And also and I'm I'm hoping that it was also a way that I was useful to those people who generously share their time at least somewhat at least a little bit because it's also a way to get customers voice and sometimes you may say like oh do you think you can add this thing this wrinkle it will be really really cool and look over the years probably some of those thoughts from customers like me got implemented. And sure, some c some thoughts from from me maybe choose specific to my style and they're not relevant for many others and they probably would be ignored and it's totally fine. But some probably I hope would got into the pro the program because few users like me would speak up about those things. So it's also I hope I contributed a little bit and not just wasted people's time who are very very busy with building the product. So but that's probably my best answer. I'm not sure whether other uh many other uh users of Alpha Sense platform necessarily do good at. >> No, I think that's great. I I certainly not reaching out to the product manager specifically. So, okay. Anyway, hey, I I think we've run for a little bit over an hour, so I think we're really breaching the limits of what the AlphaSense webinar platform can handle. Uh Arnum Poken from Carcon Capital. I mean, both of us are power users, both of us are happy users. Thanks for hopping on this podcast and discussing all things AI, expert calls, AlphaSense, not AlphaSense, everything. It's really fun and uh we will have to chat soon. >> Okay, talk. Bye, Andrew. >> Bye everybody. >> A quick disclaimer. Nothing on this podcast should be considered investment advice. Guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial adviser. Thanks.
Artem Fokin on Improving with AI and Expert Calls
Summary
Transcript
You're about to listen to the yet another value podcast with your host me, Andrew Walker. Today's episode is I This is a follow-up to the podcast I did with Ardam Finan, my friend, on perfecting the investment process. This is a webinar that we did on AlphaSense. We talk a lot about using AI and expert calls in the research process, using them for improvement, all that sort of stuff. This was behind a payw wall for AlphaSense, but they said after a month, hey, we're getting good reviews. why don't you put it out on the podcast and try and get more listenership and let you know we want the we want this to be out there. So I think you're really going to enjoy it. I hope you do. I'll include a link to the prior perfecting the investment process uh podcast with Ardum in the show notes which was one of to be frank one of the most popular podcasts I've ever done. We got tons of great feedback on it. So I think you're really going to like that podcast. I think you'll really enjoy this podcast if you like that podcast. So we're going to get all there in a second but first a word from our sponsors. Today's episode is sponsored by AlphaSense. Look, over the years, you've heard me talk about it non-stop. AlphaSense, Tigus, they've become core to how I do investment research. They they've got a burgeoning set of AI tools. They've got the expert calls, which I absolutely love. The expert call library. They've got over, as they tell me, over 500 million premium sources from company filings, broker reports, news, trade journals, everything. Plus the expert calls, they put it all in one place. Their AI tools let you search unique data sources in really interesting ways. This October they're hosting their first ever Alpha Summit 2025 in Brooklyn. I'll be dropping in and out. So the event will feature all sorts of lead leaders from finance, UBS, Wells Fargo, Assenture, Google, who's who are going to be there sharing how AI is reshaping the investment research and decision-making landscape. Uh what's going to make special is it's just not just about the ideas. It's about really talking about how AI can improve workflows and the strategies that top firms are using right now. So I'd love to see you there. If you're going, you can join me there. AlphaSense, Alphasummit 2025, October 6th through 8th at the refinery at the Domino. You can sign up at alphasense.comyavp. That's alpha-sense.comyavp. All right. Hello and welcome to the uh I I guess it's just the Alphasense user webinar with me, Andrew Walker, the host of Yet Another Value podcast, and my good friend Ardum Poken. He is the head of Caracon Capital. Artem, how's it going? >> Hi, Andrew. Great seeing you again. >> Look, Artem, let me I well, let's just start. Disclaimer, nothing on this webinar is investing advice. I don't think we're talking specific stocks, but we might dive into some like real-time examples. So, people should remember that. And I'm sure AlphaSense will do disclaimers out the wazu. Look, I I'll set the stage and then we can dive into everything. We were talking to the people at Alphasense. So, we are both users, subscribers, whatever you want to call it. I think we both find huge amounts of value from the product. I think we find huge amounts of value in different pieces of the product. AlphaSense and Tigus are like they've got everything at this point. But we said it and they said, "Hey, why don't you guys come on and do a webinar talking about uh you know, we just did a podcast talking about I don't think it was quite process improvement, but our process as investors." And a lot of that for me personally, a lot of the process improvements for me over the past 10 years has been adopting AI into my investing process and adopting expert calls into my investing process. I was already doing a little but you know both have ramped up and both of them have ramped up materially in large part thanks to Tikas AlphaSense and the tools and you know the expert call library network and everything. So we told them about that all that sort of stuff and like hey why don't you guys get on talk about using AI in your process talking about using expert calls in your process talk about how you use alpha for process. That's the overall idea for this webinar. An hour of us talking about all of that. Would you add anything to that or anything else people should feel like they're going to get from this hour of the webinar? >> I think the theme of the both our prior conversation on yet another value podcast and today's verbina is the same theme improving and perfecting our craft as investors. So I stand behind that. Obviously, when you and I were talking on the public, so to speak, podcast, we were speaking more broad themes as opposed to concrete specific tools of the trade. We were talking about how to use a hammer to hit on a nail or whatever other tool you may be using. Here we will probably be talking a little bit more about okay how do you choose a hammer or any other tool or how do you use it and how you're changing your use cases. So I think probably this conversation I'm more likely to be more specific. So I'll be sharing some of my examples and use cases. You may throw some of yours. So I'm really looking forward but the theme is I think it is the same. I I I think you're exactly correct and I I think the way we're going to structure this is we're going to talk about expert using expert calls using AI and then as we continue that dive deeper and deeper and narrow into the how if people are listening to this and are subscribed to Alpha Centigus how they can use specific Alpha Centigus tools to uh in their process as we dive deeper and deeper. So let me just start off. I made a contention in there that I I'd love for you to push back on, agree with, disagree with. Over the past 10 years, I think the biggest change and improvement in my process has been, you know, when I was at McKenzie or when I was at Bane Capital, we would do expert calls all the time. But when you switch from a place kind of with approaching unlimited resources to being, let's just call it more individual investor, small solo practitioner, whatever it is, you lost that access to, hey, I want to learn this company. I I'm going to go do 20 expert calls and spend a thousand bucks an expert call. or you know you didn't have 15 analysts to go summarize uh everything that's ever been written in a research report. I think the biggest process improvement has been expert call libraries. So you can get access to basically unlimited amounts of expert calls for extreme for an annual subscription. That's new over the past 10 years. And then AI, it can summarize 20 earnings reports. So you don't need 10 analysts under you to like kind of get summaries of big uh earnings report. Would you agree with that contention? Would you disagree? How have you kind of thought about those just two overall process improvements over the past 10 years? >> I wouldn't necessarily call them process improvements per se. I keep using that term and you keep pushing back on me. I would call them disruptive innovation that came to the investment research space and in terms of pro in terms of tools that I use those meaning expert call libraries and bespoke expert calls because the price drop dramatically as you pointed out with the advent of tigus and stream mosaic alpha sense again I will use the alpha sense and tigus interchangeably because Now it's under the same umbrella and we don't need to trace exact corporate history. Those load the cost and the library again technological innovation network effect that was built by connecting creators and readers and by the way you can be both creator and read at the same time that usually expands the total addressable market and lowers the cost. Because of that you convert a pure variable cost model into semi semi-fix semivariable that would led to the expansion of entire time and use k and usage of expert calls in my opinion. I haven't seen the data obviously but that's my guess and I think I'm fairly confident that I'm right about that. So those were two disruptive innovations. people may bring in some credit card data or alternative data that are still very very very very expensive and we don't use that much of credit card and we don't use credit card data and our alternative data is pretty simple such as Google trends by the way Alpha Sense maybe you figure out how to build something and lower the cost in that vertical as well but for me personally expert code libraries and advanti were two biggest disruptive innovation in the environment that I've been implementing into my process. >> I agree. Let's dive into expert calls. So, the reason I want to start I think AI is a little buzzier and I think AI like everyone should and should be experienced with AI tools, but I want to start with expert calls because I I I think that you're a tool that bluntly wielded can be useful, but I think the finer you kind of like sharpen that sword, I think that it's like a force multiplier in terms of the effectiveness of expert calls. And I mean that both for reading expert call libraries, reading expert call transcripts, but especially for conducting expert interviews. Like I know you and I have done some together before. I've been on calls with other people. When I'm on an expert call with someone who's really good versus someone who, you know, someone who's really good, someone who's super prepared versus someone who might be doing it by the seat of the bank, I'm just always impressed by how much more I learn and everything. So I I just want to stop there. how do you use expert calls and then we can start diving into the different ways to use them and everything. Okay, so as I joke most of my time I spent either listening or reading. So and if you use these two modalities unsurprisingly these are two use cases for expert calls. I either listen meaning I conduct a bespoke expert call or I read a certain number of calls that are already in the library and that number can well if there are already a lot of calls the number what I am reading can vary from just a few because maybe there are not that many and I think the record one was probably 70 calls across uh tus and alpha sense that I that I've read and I did probably five or six of my own as well and I literally read 70 calls. Since then the number has only gone up now. It's probably up to 100 or so and I literally read all of them and that was a lot of fun because the business was sufficiently complex and by the way I could mention the business to put things in perspective. It's a IWG the hybrid working flex space provider that does operations globally. Full disclaimer Kraken Capital LLC and all its affiliates are loan the shares of IWG. This is not investment advice or recommendation to buy or sell any securities. So I'm just giving it for context. The business is complex and had a long history and a lot of evolution and lots of moving pieces. So my first thinking was I'll do five expert calls and I'll figure this out. Did five bespoke expert calls. Did not figure anything out. back to square one like okay I guess I need to read these 70 calls and then I methodically read all of them but both on IWG and we work because it's a very close P and when you study the industry you want to study several players if they exist and that was incredibly educational for me and informative and now many things that come up like yeah I know the answer I've read this call and someone in the industry or a client mentioned this it was mentioned two or three years ago but the same rational that's applicable today. So I love reading those things and I also love doing my own. In fact, what often excites me when I research a company is when I log in into Alpha Sense, I put the ticker and I and I choose that I want to get search results only for expert calls and it shows zero calls or one or two calls. It means that probably nobody really looked at it and that's for me is an opportunity to learn more about this in company that I perceive as an interesting investment opportunity and deepen my research tremendously compared to probably what is out there where let me a lot of questions but let me start with one just like sourcing of experts. So, uh, I run the yet another value podcast. And one thing I've started doing recently is I've actually started trying to do a an expert call on every company before I have the before I do the podcast on the company. You know, it's a idea focused podcast for those who haven't listened one hour long. You can listen to it, you can. It doesn't matter. But I I've started trying to do an expert call on every company before I do the podcast so that I have more informed questions, more interesting insights, all that sort of stuff. But one thing that's jumped out to me is like, you know, some podcasts it's so obvious who I want to do the expert call on. You know, you're doing uh a company that has one 80% customer. Guess what? I want to talk to somebody who works at the 80% customer and get their insights into the company. You know, you're doing a company that's got a a new drug. I want to talk to a doctor who's prescribing the drug. Ask them how they're viewing it. Ask them how they're seeing. Some companies, you know, I would use as a very loose example. If I was going to do an expert call on Berkshire Hathaway, what the heck expert call would I do, right? It's this conglomerate that is basically Warren Buffett and like a former wouldn't really help. Charlie Mer rest in peace, but he wouldn't even talk to me. But like I wouldn't do a former. It's really a culture con. And I say that because consolation software like what that is a rollup of uh you know software businesses focused on municipal governments if I remember their core uh focus correctly. What is what am I going to do with constellation software if I'm going to talk to an expert? Like it's literally a hundred different small companies rolled up together. Uh there are several other ones, but I I strugg with that. So when do you know if an expert company an expert call works for a company, works for an investment thesis versus maybe doesn't like the Berkshire Hathway example. >> Okay, great question. Before I answer that, let me just clarify something that what you probably meant to say. I think he was saying that if a if a company has a very large customer, you may want to talk to the customer. I think what you meant to say is that you want to talk to a former employee of that very large customer. >> Yes. Yes, you are exactly >> because from compliance perspective talking to a big customer is not prudent or smart. You are right. The compliance people will hop on and and I want to be very clear, Alpha Sense has fantastic compliance team who is very thoughtful, very diligent, conservative in a good way conservative and they would not source an expert which could present a compliance or legal issue. So in Andrew's example, the right way to go about it will be find someone who left that customer a year ago. >> Yes. who may understand the product, understand the process, understand the relationship, but that person has no information that may restrict the investor. >> Yes. And then again, AlphaSense team fantastic on that sense. And by the way, that's another great thing about using AlphaSense uh call expert library or asking to organize calls by AlphaSense. there is a record that has been reviewed by compliance team and you know that you're you're clear you're good that's another again it's it's not what you asked but it was very pertinent point you make right now okay going back to the heart of your question is uh sourcing expert calls remember our conversation about golf and different cs >> yes >> yesterday so you need to use a and by the way for those who didn't listen our prior conversation. I do not play golf unfortunately. So, but the analogy which I used yesterday was that for different situations you use different tools. Similar in golf, for different terrain, you use different cups. Otherwise, you're not going to do well at golf. So, here's the same. This is how I approach it. Usually, you figure out the key ingredients for success of your investment thesis. For example, if your idea is based on product superiority that the company has launched six months ago and you believe that this product is massively superior to everything else out there, maybe it's safer, maybe it's cheaper, maybe it's more efficient. You know, people in Silicon Valley like to to say like, "Oh, this is 10x better or 10x cheaper." Now 10x is a more of a figurative way to describe that. It may not necessarily the 10x better but it should be better very substantial. In that case you need to focus I would want to focus all my research efforts on that product and understand customer perspective both people who already using that superior product people who switched people who have not switched but tried and people who didn't even bother learn out about the product and understand what's stopping them that's one example another example there may be a thesis which is based okay product is fantastic I got comfortable with that In business, there are two problems as my Stanford business school professor joked. You know those problems? >> Problem number one, not enough sales. Problem number two, everything else. >> Okay, so you got the product. Can the company sell tons of that product or service? Do they have a wellestablished sales motion, an incredibly running sales machine or not? Guess what? In that case, I will want to talk to former salespeople. What's the sales process is like the there is another company that Karakan Capital Ly and all its affiliates own called Softwave Softwave Medical listed in Israel. Again, this is not investment advice. So, in my opinion, based on my research, they have superior product and you can ask me later how I got to that conclusion and why it's superior, etc., etc., but I also wanted to understand the sales process. So Also Sans helped me source a former salesperson and I spoke with him for now and I literally asked him could you role play with me your conversation imagine I am a doctor dermatologist you came to my office we shake hands and I ask you why you're here why you taking my time away from my schedule and from my patients. Let's go through that. And we literally borderline did a role play probably for 20 minutes overall over the course of entire hour. And then I was asking different other questions. That's incredibly helpful to understand how these sales happen because sometimes it's very easy when you are in our Excel or notion or Microsoft Word whatever we use it's very easy to think that sales just happen but sales just don't happen. someone needs to sell it like everything which is in my office here has been somehow sold to me. So, and I think understanding sales process is one of the most incredible things like overall I believe that if someone by the way like if so I'm in my early 40s if I look back of my life I wish I spent six months in sales in something ideally B2B just to understand the process and psychological challenges of that and how it works. I think it would have made me a better investor. Now I'm in my early 40s. I'm not going to go back and get the job, but the best I can do is either talk to people who are in sales and learn from them or read expert collaboratories about sales process and how it works. >> You know, so I'm going to keep I think you will know the company I'm talking about. I'm going to keep it anonymized intentionally, but one really interesting example I I've seen recently is there's a company and they have an FDA approved study that says their uh let's just call it device defective rate is 1%. And all of their FDA all of their peers are last generation products and it's 10%. So when you see that you would say, "Oh my god, this product is literally 10x better." You you chose 10x 10x and these defects are they're pretty bad. you know, it's an FD, it's an implant device. If you have a defect, it's there's another surgery at minimum required, right? So, you read that and you say, "Oh my god, this is a 10x better product." And it's so interesting when you do expert calls on this company, when you talk to salespeople about how they're selling it to people using that using that, hey, this product is 10x better. Do you really want to take the uh medical malpractice risk of putting this putting a different product in when this product's 10% better? Versus when you talk to doctors and then you hear doctors and you say, "Hey, I'm reading an FDA study that says this product is 1% defect rate versus other lastg products at 10%. Why are you still using a 10% lastg product?" And they say, "Hey, the last gen products were only were all of the FDA studies were done in the '9s. Guess what? There have been huge process improvements and huge improvements in surgical techniques since then. We think that the last gen products are just as safe as the current gen products and we've got our own evidence in our surgery specs up. So, it's just it's really interesting. You know, you hear the company spin and then you can use the expert calls to dive in and hear how the Salesforce is using it and maybe if the if the customer in this case the surgeons are buying it or not buying it. I I have more questions on expert calls, but I think that's a really interesting anonymized example I tried to give. I'll pause there and let you just comment on any piece or if they that comment on that again uh on on a company that we own and it has FDA clearances. It's very interesting. I asked probably six, seven, eight doctors and they they and I asked them. So again, I'm talking about soft wave here, right? I'm still box. >> We still loan the shares. Nothing changed in the last five minutes. So they have almost 10 I think it's I believe at number nine. So let's let's round it to 10 for the sake of simplicity as the clearances for various indications. And as far as I understand based on my research and conversations by alpha science almost nobody else has as many. So then ask doctors doctor wave has this number of clearances and that device doesn't or has only one or two do your doctor care and interestingly I receive a fairly broad range of responses some people care because they say my liability if something goes down is a lot lower the risk of that because I was using an FD clear device point indication that was clear for me. It gives more comfort. I like that on the other extreme and I will skip all the shades between those two extremes. Someone may say, "I don't really care. I'm really good at what I do. I can use it off label. I'm super confident doctor. I don't care." For me, it's just a marketing bus. I don't care. That's a range of opinions. And that's again something that I've gotten more comfortable as over the years as I've done many many many many expert calls is that sometimes there will be no one answer because different customers may have different opinions and that's okay because some probably I was obviously less experienced back then and I was in general and less experienced in conducting expert calls. You go and you expect like you ask a question and every single doctor in our example will give you the same answer. >> Yes. Yes. >> Great. I got it. It's certain. Nothing is certain. Different people have different opinions and that's okay. But it's incredibly helpful to understand the broad range of opinions and incorporate them into your thinking about the investment thesis whatever that thesis is. >> Let me go back. So you mentioned when you were talking about softwave talking to a former salesperson and formers are actually the the discussions I have the hardest time with because most formers by definition have left the company and I find that they can >> I think it's not always I think it's everybody left the company otherwise they're not former >> by definition that's why I said by definition they've left the company uh they many of the most of the time the formers leave not I I don't know if it's most time but a lot of the formers I talked to have left through a layoff especially now you know on the heels of the 2022 like kind of the all the growth stocks going through a round of cost cutting a round of fat trimming a lot of the formers left through layoffs and I find sometimes it is hard to cut through the bitterness of having left from a layoff versus how the the customers actually treat it or sometimes the person loved being at the place uh was wildly successful left and they've got nothing to say but great things about the company and then you look and like the company's kind of going up in flames and you're like oh well it's hard to marry them. So I I I want to ask like how do you kind of separate the bias of a former whether it's positive or negative versus what you're learning in the call because I just find they can be such double-edged swords when you talk to them. >> It's difficult. Um let me ask you this before I answer the question. >> As far as I know you're married. I know your wife's name. I think you mentioned it publicly. I will say her name is Alicia. So, okay. Fantastic. Uh, have you had uh girlfriends before you married? >> Art, are you trying to get me in trouble here, bro? >> No, no, I'm not. I hope >> I might might have had one or two. >> Okay. So, I'm hoping that if someone calls them and asks, "Is Andrew a good human being?" they will probably say that you're a good human being, even though you're not together anymore. So I think formers is a little bit the same. And by the way may be formers for variety of reasons. Not all of them got laid off. Some of them got a better career option. >> Yes, >> they accepted the offer. They moved on. There is no really there is not much bitter feelings in that case. There will be some thoughts. But where I'm leaving with my question about your dating history, Alicia, I'm really sorry. I hope I will not get and ender into trouble. So is I think how the company would treat a former employee if that employee was dismissed whether fired or laid off doesn't really matter. It also tells you a lot about the company culture. I think one of the best indic indicators about indirect evidence about culture that I've had with formers is when a person will honestly tell me there was a round of of lay offs unfortunately I was let go I think it's a great company it's unfortunate and then you ask them if they call you tomorrow and say hey business is doing better we need more people we love you we're sorry that you had to leave. Would you like to come back? And many people say, "Oh, yeah." Some people say no. Some people say yes. That's a telling sign. Similarly, would you recommend your brother or sister or a nephew or a niece to work there? It tells you something about the culture. Now, it's only one piece of evidence. And again, you and I spoke about this yesterday. We are in the business of making judgment and decisions. So similarly in this case when we talk to any expert we need to make a judgment about their credibility and it's not always easy often it's difficult you know what I was doing before I went to business school right in my prior professional life >> yes >> okay what I was doing before that >> you you were a tax lawyer >> yeah I was a lawyer right so now in law there is this concept of preponderance of evidence so I and some of those frameworks from my legal days. I think I still use them as a mental frameworks in my investing. So I think prepundonderance of evidence would be one of those. I cannot establish with certainty that what 10 experts customers for employees industry consultants whoever told me is true. I don't know. They may be lying possible. They may be telling me the truth, what they believe is truth, but they're simply wrong. It it could happen. All of us are human beings. But what you're trying to do, you're trying to build a case that way where there is a very high chance supported by that prepundonderance of evidence that this would be a good investment to make based on your thesis. Can I let me >> Can you ever get to beyond the reasonable doubt which is the standard in criminal proceedings? Probably not in investing unfortunately. But could you get at least to prepundonderance of evidence kind of more likely than not standard? I think so. That's what we're trying to do. Let me I I like what you said. You're never like it would be awesome if we could interview 5,000 forformers at every company and like really build a database and be like oh yeah there were 20 who were upset but 4,980 didn't this is a great company you know in terms of extremes right I've done calls before and I'm thinking of a specific company with three formers right and this was a smaller company so three formers is a a large percentage of their farmers two of them were happy had good things to say and one of them, you know, was one star review would have been too high, right? They it was as little as they could go. They were this was the worst place in the world. Uh now all of these guys had left through layoffs and I don't know like the guy who I was interviewing, he was there for nine months. You know, he might have been surprised by the layoff. It was a pretty miserable experience. But I just wonder how do you weigh the extremes? Whether it's my example where there's one person who is unbelievably bitter or you know sometimes I'll do calls and three people are meh you know company's fine wouldn't go back but no no bad words to say and one person is over the moon do you you know in investing extremes are what makes much of an investing career so do you weigh extremes more less how do you think about that >> I need context I cannot apply in general without reading those those transcripts and making a specific judgment call. That's number one. Number two, you also get other data points. For example, this is my frame of reference which may be incorrect, but I believe that generally generally companies with crappy culture and unhappy employees do not make great products. Usually it means that if I'm seeing that the company has really crappy product and one out of three employees in your example was unhappy and speaks very negatively with one star review will be too generous. I'm more likely to believe the expert testimony. Let's use that word. While if the company is shipping great products and has happy happy customers who are enthusiastic about the product or service, I'm probably less likely to put more weight on the unhappy former employee. And by the way, all of us have this type of experience. Few years ago, I invested that's not a current position. I invested in a health care service company and healthcare service company broadly defined it was more on the dealing with insurance company let's say so and I spoke with few formers and one of them was very very negative but when you look at his specific lines and what he said and you match it with management commentary you match it with what other people are saying you get to the conclusion that he's probably off base and too emotional and too unhappy and he's not really supporting it by facts. And then there is another thing which here which is important is the art of asking follow-up questions. If someone says like company culture is horrible, it's horrendous. It's toxic. You're very interesting to hear. I'm so glad you said that. Could you give me an example? And then if you get one example, then you ask for another example. You keep digging. Like think about it. You put that person on the witness stand and you're trying to get respect in their confidentiality agreements and NDAs and everything else. Of course, you try to get what is behind. And if they give you examples that for you seem totally toxic, yeah, maybe there's a problem. If they cannot come up with any tangible things and it's all big words, they probably have credible. That's great on expert calls. And again, the reason I want to start there is because I I mean at this point, you and I have talked about I I do an expert call week. I probably read at transcript like I I I find them to be hugely helpful tools and I I just the more you apply them to investing just even in terms of if you're following a company calling a customer a different customer once a month once a quarter whatever it is and asking them or asking them hey you're buying this product what do you think and obviously within all compliance rules every what do you think like it's just really interesting to continue to build that mosaic and if people aren't doing it I I I think you're getting left behind and it's one of the few areas where you can build kind of mosaic information that is going to be pretty unique to you. Any last thoughts on expert calls or can I start switching over to AI? >> I have I have a few ones on on expert calls. So, first screening questions screen questions alone can be fantastic source of value. >> Yes. So what I usually do I always design my own expert calls and ask the team could you ask this call these questions okay I never ask anything about the career history because that will be available in bio you don't want to waste a screening question on that because you cannot ask 20 of them you ask like three or four so that's number one number two I always try to understand what that person was doing dayto day sometimes it's pretty obvious sometimes it's less obvious so that's what I try to understand I try to ask questions of two types it can be either open-ended and I'm hoping that expert will write two three four sentences and sometimes you learn a lot from those sentences alone and some questions I might ask and this is more applies for a very when you look for a proverbial needle in in a hashtag you ask them rate me you give them several areas of business like marketing sales supply chain management etc procurement etc etc and then you ask them rate your knowledge of each of them on based on the scale of 1 to 10 and what ideally you want to do you want to see lot of ones and twos and one or two 8 n 10 because it would mean that the expert is honest and not exaggerating their expertise Because if they show I can talk about sales and technology and product management and marketing probably they know nothing unless they will see you but if they say marketing sorry I have no idea but supply chain management n out of 10 I'm very knowledgeable I was blah blah blah that was my tal was doing that's that's very different game so then also when I read a lot of expert I read a lot of expert calls as you and I discussed And sometimes it's very clear that people are uh people who conduct them ask questions that it's very clear almost in advance that the expert will not be able to answer. Like for example, do not ask salesperson about accounting or do not discuss with marketing person why stock why stockbased compensation is so high. they they wouldn't know unless they accounting junkie and study accounting textbooks for fun on Saturdays and Sundays. So you need to calibrate that. Now sometimes I get it you may have a call for an hour it's 40 minutes in you ask all your questions you kind of realize that expert maybe not as good as you hoped which happens and then you just okay let me ask everything else. It it could happen. But sometimes I see like, oh my god, why they asking this? They they should have followed up on this. So, and I'm sure I made I made my own mistakes. I'm not saying I'm perfect whatsoever. That's a continuous improvement, but that's another uh common mistake. And then one use case that I wanted to highlight on our prior investment at Karakan Capital and we don't own shares anymore is a company called Crocs. the the way I joke then those very interestingly looking shoes. So this is the stage. Let me set that set up the stage. As far as I remember summer 2022, Crox is trading probably at five and a half maybe six times earnings for 2022 and it's already some let's say June. Okay, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that either the company is going out of business soon in the next few years or it's horribly mispriced. And what happened? Crocs had tremendous uplift in sales during co and the key question was is it just another co beneficiary and it's all going to collapse? By collapse I don't mean the settle stock price. It was already down horribly. I'm talking about fundamental performance or whether it's not. How do you figure this out? It's very difficult. And what we did, I spoke with several former employees and they pulled and some of them left even before CO. But they shared with me all those internal changes that the company has made before CO and then CO probably helped with the whole stay and very casual wearing casual trend. Sure. But the company built such a fantastic based on my research I can be mistaken foundation that they were able to take advantage of those coded tailwinds and that foundation is probably not disappearing and that was very valuable learning but again that was almost a history guide. Look that what happened in 17 that what happened in 18 this was the change we got the new markets in person we changed this we changed that etc etc. That was an incredible tutorial in the history. It's almost like you're traveling to, I don't know, big France, uh, to see some castles from medieval times and you get a local guide with a major in history. Guess what? They will tell you a lot of valuable things that you would not discover otherwise. That's the analogy. Let's that was great and I actually have following questions but I I I want to be cognizant of time on the webinar and everything and I want to move on to talking about AI and I'd love to just start you know broadly we can dive into alphaent specific tools and I do want to talk about alpha specific tools since this is an alpha webinar and everything but just broadly what how have you been incorporating AI into your your process how how are you kind of using them what tools are you using >> okay so I think this is where we stopped yesterday so the way I think about uh The usage of AI in my investing process is across the line of the framework that I've heard from Paul Enright on one of his podcast. I believe it was podcast with Patans on Invest like the best. If I'm wrong then it was in capital allocators. So and he breaks it into digging, analyzing deciding and it's very simple. There are three stages. It's not this is the flowchart diagram with with 100 boxes. It's pretty simple but I found it's effective in general and especially when I think about AI. So I think and then I break it where AI for me is delivering most productivity boost and it's mostly in a little bit and analyzing so far zero in deciding and this is my view as of August 6 I believe today. So it could change in the future as technology evolves, as I evolved. So that's number one. Number two, simplistically we can break usage of AI into can you do something with AI that you used to do but it will save you a lot of time versus can you do something with AI that you would that you were never able to do. I figured out many use cases for the first one. I have not figured out use cases for the second one yet. I hope I will. So on digging AI provides productivity boost in many ways and I will walk you through some use cases and again as I mentioned yesterday I feel that AI and expert collaborates were a match made in heaven. So now I can be using AI as a core research copilot. I'll give you an example. I met a company at a conference in May the Riley conference was interesting group meeting came away thinking that maybe an interesting company to research. Got back home few days later pull out of some DIC writeups just to get what the thesis has been. I start reading it the write up says this company operates in 10 states. Okay, there are 50 states in the nation. They still have 40 states left. At least based on roughly two years ago, but did it change? It has been two years. Maybe now they in 30 or 50 or 60. Okay, not 60. 60 wouldn't be too much. 50. So like I don't know. In the old days, what I would need to do, I would need to open my notion file, type there question list which I have in the template, and type how many states is this company currently operating. And then I will need to go open 10K and look for it. etc., etc. Now what I do, I have my PDF file with VIC write up or VIC itself on one screen. I have alpha sense on another. I pull out AI assistant. I ask how many states is the company currently operating? Also, could you please provide the history of how the number of states changed over the years and any other relevant information such as revenue breakdown by state or group of state or whatever. I know 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 8 seconds, I get an answer. I quickly read and I know, okay, since then they expanded to this number of states and they got core states or legacy states. This is where most revenue comes from and they got new states, but they still ramping up, etc., etc. Like, fantastic. I don't need to write this question down anymore. And then remember to check 10K and go. So that's my research copilot need. >> I love that. I'm I'm completely with you just in terms of the use cases of summarizing or I know I want to go to the uh I I want to go to the past three proxies and see how incentive comp has changed over time and that used to be like I'm pretty fast but that used to be a multi-hour process right you have to open three proxies scroll through them really compare read like these companies don't exactly make it easy to see how much they're paying each people and why they're paying them with with any type of AI tool it's a second. It's a 10-second process. Hey, how has Incentive Comp in evolved over the past three years? Um, let let me ask specifically. So, that's that was just generic AI. Uh, I think there's really interesting to things about merging AI and expert calls, but I I think we can hit on them as we talk about what about AlphaSense specifically like they have especially over the past six to n months. Let's just talk about how are using AlphaSense specific tools because they over the past six months they've rolled out several and they're going to roll out several more and they're getting much better. So what AlphaSent specific tools are using? >> Okay. So you're right. AlphaSense is shipping bunch of new features, right? So that's fantastic. Features are getting shipped and shipped and shipped and there are more and more and more. So now I will tell you my so the the one obviously they have is the chat and the chat can work in regular chat or you can turn on deep search mode on the chat if you want something bigger output and you wanted to think longer. So that's always that's fairly similar use case to chat or perplexity or whatever general AI or what I call horizontal AI you use. My favorite personal feature of the Alpha Sense is what they call grid and you can make grid almost it's like a lag on my sound place. You can turn that grid in almost whatever you want. For example, I will give you a few example that I use. I will give you some examples that I think I would like to use but but haven't done much of it yet because of more on my investment style as opposed to limitations of alt sense because that tool is very powerful. So imagine you got Andrew calls me and says RM I have this great stock idea this is the thesis etc. Okay, I want to understand customer perspective. I go to Alpha Sense and there are 20 expert calls, most of them with customers. I got no clue which one was a good call, which one was a average call and all of them are pretty long. 20 calls to read. That's a good amount of time. And usually when I read, I also take a lot of notes and it means that my reading time actually goes up. figuring out where to focus and this goes back to digging stage is very very important. Now what I have I pre-built and this is important. Alpha sense gives you some templates you can use them but I made those templates myself that will fit my investment style and my focus and I have different templates for grid. I will have templates that is more targeted towards product. Another one will be more targeted towards company strategy, competition, risk, etc. And you can build as many as you want. If you're software as a service investor, you can build one for SARS, another one you can build for industrials or for consumer, whatever you like. There's lot of flexibility there. And grid looks exactly think about as a chessboard. There are horizontal lines and there are vertical lines. Horizontal lines. This is documents. By the way, documents can be any. It can be expert calls. You know, is this is what I'm using as my example. It can be earnings calls. It can be 10k and cues or proxies in your example Andrew in incentive compensation whatever you like and then columns will be questions and I think you can put up to 12 questions and you what is really and then you ask those questions and you see what you get in the chart and by the way that's another cool thing about alpha sense okay I'm not technologist so if alpha if a dot I describe is actually incorrect I apologize in advance but my understanding is that alpha sense Because it's a specialized vertical AI tool, it makes the prompting by user less important, less critical to get a good output because I think at the back end they kind of transform your lousy prompt into something a lot more thoughtful. Now you can still try to be thoughtful and I try to do that but that's a big advantage in my opinion of using a specialized AI tool versus generic AI tool or general AI tool such as JPT or Plexity or whatever else. So and then I got this prompt and it can be what's customer value proposition. How what made you decide to buy this product? How long will the sales cycle? What other alternatives have you considered etc etc etc. And then you click it takes a little bit of time and then you got this grid with 20 expert calls horizontally and your 12 questions vertically. And then you can read very quickly 20 answers if they were given because some of them maybe this did not come up in one question just by moving in vertical line. You just do that and then number one you got 20 points of view in just few minutes. Remember you and I spoke about doctors who may give different opinions about the same issue. Now you got the entire range of opinions within I don't know five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever it takes for you to read those. And more important, you can repeat this for all your 12 questions. But then I also figure out which expert or several of them give the most thoughtful answers. >> Yes. >> Or alternatively, I can figure out which expert call gives me yellow flags or red flags. In that case, I would go if I see two, let's say out of 20 calls, I have three with red flags or yellow flags. I will go there and then I will read myself from first page up to the last page including disclaimer and page numbers and then I will I may make a decision that given this yellow flags I'm not comfortable making this investment so I will kill my research idea alternatively I will figure out three or four or five calls that are the best and I'll go there and then I may decide is the other 15 not important or am I still okay knowing me I will still redone but it would be just to make sure that I didn't miss something because my thesis al already has been confirmed and that's a massive time boost and efficiency boost driven by I and the theme here for me human and I think I got this idea from Gary Kasparov the 13th world champion chess champion and he coined it many years ago and the premise is that human plus machine is more powerful than machine and definitely more powerful than human so that's the idea now it may always be the case. Who knows? We'll do another uh webinar in 10 years where my avatar will be talking to Andrew's avatar all powered by AI tools. And maybe I'm wrong on that premise, but that's how I approach it. The the other just I if I can Yes. And the other interesting thing I found very similar to what you said is I like to ask a question about especially when I'm new to a company. I like to ask a question in Gen Grid and then I just look through it and I see you know it labels kind of what what call the quotes are coming from and whatever call often one call will have the most quotes popping up and I'll be like oh that call is the call most likely to answer the question that I am asking. So I don't have to read 20, you know, if I want something specific on the Salesforce, I don't have to read through if there's 20 transcripts, six of them till I find, oh, here's the one that really talks about Salesforce. It's just there. And that might sound obvious, but often time it's not obvious when you're like just looking at the overall or anything. I I found that's been a great way to really speed up what what I want to focus on. And one thing uh let me ask ahead can I talk about deep research a little bit future how because I mentioned that in passing but I think it's very much worth paying attention so this is how I mostly use the deep research feature imagine I got an idea from somewhere it may be a screen it may be Andrew's podcast yet another value podcast please go and subscribe it can be a peer in my network who shared with me an interesting thesis whatever the source is I believe. So my old process would be go read 10K or go read uh several earnings calls and conference call presentations such as Morgan Stanley TNT or JP Morgan Healthcare or whatever the case could be. And I slowly build a maza in my head and it's at that point even after reading those five calls it's far from perfect because I'm trying to really put different pieces into their places. Who is the customer base? what's the segmentation? What's the pricing? It's slow plus corporate history etc. Now I also believe and this is second input for the for what I going to say as a conclusion is that think about this as reading books. If you read a book first and then you reread it three months later you will probably get a lot deeper understanding of more intricate and complex concepts second time than you did the first time. I believe same applies to reading investment materials. If my mind is not prepared to absorb a lot of information and immediately put it into a lot of right places and the right places here is the key. I will probably create a little bit mess in my head and it will will take me more time to sort it out. But how can I apply that concept of reading book first and then reading it three months later? Or a better analogy would be this. you you got a great book recommendation. You go I will go and listen to a podcast with the author for an hour get the key concepts and say okay my mind is prepared and then I will go and read the title and my level of comprehension and retention will be a lot higher. Same with here in investing what I'm trying to replicate. I will I have a prompt I have few prompts I will use for deep research feature and it's it's a pretty long prompt probably five pages and I will ask Alpha's deep research to return me a pretty detailed output which will cover a lot of my questions and then I will sit down I usually print it out because that's how I like reading. I sit down in my reading chair, get a pencil and go through that highlighting, writing something on the margins, putting stars, slammish remarks, etc. It's probably usual output is 30, 40 pages would be my guess. Similarly, it will have great sources, all references to expert calls or earnings or conference calls and then what Andrew said then you can read those that mostly most frequently cited. But after those 30 or 40 pages, my mind is prepared. It's an equivalent of listening to a podcast with an author for an hour before reading the entire 300 to 400 page book and then I will go and with prepared mind I will start reading all those primary documents or I will start with the most important ones. That's how I use deep research. Now I also want to mention the new AI feature that I think just got shipped and I have not even used it yet but I'm very curious to use it. It's I think it's AI generated expert calls with experts. So it's AI asking questions. So I haven't got a chance to test those. It's it's got released very very recently. So I did and with earning season happening right now I didn't get a chance to try it but I'm really curious. Well that actually brings me I I want to be cognizant of time because Alpha it's an Alpha webinar. It's not my podcast where we can ramble for an hour. So, but that does bring me nicely to what I thought was going to be my last question, but maybe we'll make this the second to last question. Look, it's in the same way Bloomberg was. If anyone's had a Bloomberg trend, they're always releasing features and I everyone knows they only use like 5% of the Bloomberg features. AlphaSense is releasing releasing features really quickly. I didn't even know about this expert AI transcripting and I I use Alphasense pretty this AI talking to AI transcript. Maybe I haven't seen it. Maybe I wasn't on the beta. I don't know. But how do you what have you found the best way to keep up with new tools? And look, with AI tools, many of them are much different than tools we've ever used before. So you get this new tool and you might think, oh, you know, that's free. I don't know. And it might be the most powerful tool ever released. So how are you keeping up with you can do AI broadly if you want, but I'd prefer just because this is alpha alpha in particular all the new features that they continuously roll out. uh 90 or maybe even 95% of what I know how to use AlphaSense especially on the new features and new use cases I've learned from account manager of Kakan Capital who is responsible for our account and he's incredibly helpful he okay Amar Amar Capellan shouting out to you thank you so much for teaching me everything and I apologize for asking bunch of dumb questions so thank you for your patience I've learned from my account manager I will ask oh how this feature is released would you show me how to use it? And also because I've been working with Amar for a number of years, I think he got to know my investment style and what I do and what I don't want to do reasonably well. So he will point out answer I think he will like this use case for this feature. I like oh that's great. I I I do that's fantastic. So that's number one. Number two, sometimes I will ask Amar to spend 30 minutes with me uh on Zoom and just do a regular catchup call maybe every six months, maybe every eight months and I will be asking like, "Hey, do you have any new things that you changed or improved or added or something? Could you show me?" So that's another way for me to get up to speed and know what's changing there. So that's second. And for example, Amar showed me how to use the grid and different use cases for expert calls or for earnings calls. And another cool feature for grid you can for example let's say you cover 20 consumer good companies and you're trying to figure out what they spoke about macro consumer confidence right you can pull it out into the grid I don't do it as much because I'm not necessarily like the industry specialist but it's another great use case >> I have found it's really because look every company when they pull guidance or they miss guidance or they reduce guidance they say uh what's the most common excuse consumer the consumer soft And I have found it really, really good. You read it and you know, most people do follow-up calls with management teams, not all, but most people do follow-up calls with management team 24 hours, maybe 12 hours, maybe 12 minutes after the earnings call ends. And I found it so useful to be like, "Hey, this company said the consumer was soft uh during the quarter. What did their three here's XYZ, here's their three peers, what did they say?" And then you get on the call with them and you say, "Hey, you guys said that it was soft. You know, X, Y, and Z over there, all their results were better than yours. They said the consumer's strong. They said trends were what is it about your company that the consumer is soft? Like are you guys just using an excuse? Is there something about your specific consumer and I found it's just so good. And again, that's something you can do on your own. But if you want to do that fast, you can't do that fast. It takes a lot of time. And it's great summary. And then again, if you want to dive into it, you can go and say, "Okay, X, Y, and Z. This is what the Gen Grid said. Let me go dive in and see specifically what they said." Um, last thing again, we're we're running out of time. So I want to ask, you talk to your account manager a lot. You use Office a lot. What is something I use AlphaSense a lot and I know that I'm not using all their products properly. What is one thing that you're getting a lot of value out of AlphaSense that you think maybe the average user underutilizes, doesn't realize out there? Anything? What What's one AlphaSense tool that you think would recommend for that? >> I don't necessarily know what a typical user may or may not be doing. So my best guess would be this. Over the years I've spoken with a number of product managers who are responsible for building specific features and and now I'm talking about broad features like notebook product manager or [Music] some other like broad broad features categories features not small ones. And I've spoken with a number of them over the years. And I think it's also a great way to learn about the potential use cases and potential very powerful use cases which may not be obvious to a user right away from actually the people who were running the entire process probably from ideiating to building a prototype to testing to QA to quality assurance to shipping to users that's probably the most knowledgeable planet on the person about that feature. So that's pretty cool. And also and I'm I'm hoping that it was also a way that I was useful to those people who generously share their time at least somewhat at least a little bit because it's also a way to get customers voice and sometimes you may say like oh do you think you can add this thing this wrinkle it will be really really cool and look over the years probably some of those thoughts from customers like me got implemented. And sure, some c some thoughts from from me maybe choose specific to my style and they're not relevant for many others and they probably would be ignored and it's totally fine. But some probably I hope would got into the pro the program because few users like me would speak up about those things. So it's also I hope I contributed a little bit and not just wasted people's time who are very very busy with building the product. So but that's probably my best answer. I'm not sure whether other uh many other uh users of Alpha Sense platform necessarily do good at. >> No, I think that's great. I I certainly not reaching out to the product manager specifically. So, okay. Anyway, hey, I I think we've run for a little bit over an hour, so I think we're really breaching the limits of what the AlphaSense webinar platform can handle. Uh Arnum Poken from Carcon Capital. I mean, both of us are power users, both of us are happy users. Thanks for hopping on this podcast and discussing all things AI, expert calls, AlphaSense, not AlphaSense, everything. It's really fun and uh we will have to chat soon. >> Okay, talk. Bye, Andrew. >> Bye everybody. >> A quick disclaimer. Nothing on this podcast should be considered investment advice. Guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial adviser. Thanks.