Alap Shah, Author at Sentieo

Coronavirus Exposes Weakness in the Bloomberg Terminal Model

June 10, 2020
Author: Alap Shah

Bloomberg’s terminal business has been scrambling to react to the new reality of the coronavirus-impacted institutional investment market. Having indexes drop 30% over the course of a week and then rebound over the next few months brings a lot of viewers and eyeballs to news services, but has also exposed two fundamental weaknesses in the thesis that portfolio managers and analysts will continue to use this mainstay of equity and market research.

Coronavirus Outbreak Brings “Work from Home” Front and Center in Transcripts and the Stock Market

February 24, 2020
Author: Alap Shah

Last week we wrote about using Sentieo to stay on top of fast-moving developments and the impact on the auto industry. With the big market selloff on Monday, February 24, 2020, we looked for companies that are actually up for the day to get clues as to what sectors might be outperforming the likely volatile…

Obscure Berkshire Hathaway Filing Reveals What Warren Buffett Thinks About Kraft Heinz

August 12, 2019
Author: Alap Shah

Berkshire’s investment in Kraft Heinz has not gone smoothly. After taking Heinz private together with private equity investor 3G in 2013, Berkshire invested additional funds in the takeover of Kraft Foods in 2015, and was ready to finance a quickly-withdrawn $143 billion offer for Unilever. Things have gone south for KHC recently. The company’s stock…

Disrupting Transcripts: Spike In “Deflections” on Tesla’s Latest Call

July 26, 2019
Author: Alap Shah

In our final earnings week blog post discussing our new, machine learning-based transcript Smart Summary™, we’re taking a look at the electric car maker, Tesla. The company reported earnings and held its regular quarterly call after market hours on Wednesday, July 24, 2019. The stock dropped immediately upon the results release, and continued dropping during…

Guide to Using Alternative Data In Equity Research to Deliver Alpha: The 13 Stock Picks for H2 2019

July 16, 2019
Author: Alap Shah

Alternative data has become a mainstream source of data for investment managers, with up to 50% of funds now using it as a part of their research process. The question of how to get value from alternative data is no longer about access to the data sets; there are hundreds of vendors offering alternative datasets…

$CMG – Sentieo Index catches positive and negative inflections in Chipotle comps and correctly forecasts continuing April weakness

April 27, 2016
Author: Alap Shah

Lets take a look at how Sentieo could have helped you generate returns by tracking Chipotle’s (CMG) web and social data over the past six months. Sentieo is a new financial platform that supercharges your research process & returns by combining deep document search, tracking of new web and social datasets and an integrated research…

The Accounting Neverland: Software that refuses to grow up

February 18, 2016
Author: Alap Shah

One way to perform due diligence on a company is to look at the estimated useful life assumptions behind the depreciation and amortization calculations. Overly optimistic assumptions will inflate reported earnings while overly conservative assumptions will deflate reported earnings. One outlier is Continental Resources (CLR). This oil and gas producer estimates that the useful life of its “Enterprise…

Performing due diligence on Martin Shkreli

December 8, 2015
Author: Alap Shah

The pharma CEO Martin Shkreli has been attracting attention lately after taking a very large position in KaloBios Pharmaceuticals. After Shkreli made his initial investment, the stock has risen roughly 40-fold. One of the more interesting documents that I found was the Retrophin 8-K filed on August 17, 2015 (EDGAR, snt.io). Shkreli’s former employer seemed a little unhappy…

When did Valeant first talk about Philidor?

November 23, 2015
Author: Alap Shah

Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX) has drawn a lot of controversy over its ties to the specialty pharmacy Philidor. An October 21, 2015 report by Citron Research was provocatively titled: “Valeant: Could this be the Pharmaceutical Enron?”. Making note of the report’s impact on Valeant securities, a Bloomberg news article remarked: The company’s bonds erased more than…