See response above. And not just fraud detection. We plan to expand to other areas including credit/bankruptcy, ESG and tracking macro changes and trends
A few reasons but the primary one is impact. Our mission is corporate accountability through information transparency. Once you become a hedge fund your incentives for information dissemination become warped.
We don't sell to filers. Ever. Got to protect against conflicts of interest. That's one of the reasons we don't have a true free version of the product.
That said, we're using language models so replacing words with synonyms won't evade the model as long as its expressing the same thing.
We love footnoted! Michelle Leder of footnoted has been really supportive of our work. She recognizes that it's an important area for tech innovation. footnoted isn't operating right now but when it comes back, we'll support her and collaborate if we can.
We're often compared to AlphaSense, Sentieo and InsiderScore but our product is pretty different. Competitor products focus on sentiment and linguistic metrics or search etc, not on extracting and organizing important textual content.
Yeah, people have been doing sentiment analysis of press releases etc for years now and very few corporates bother trying to use software to test/counteract it
I love that. I agree until the "nothing" bit. Some things do get priced in. You can see specific stocks "react" to news, adjusted for market returns etc. ESG factors do appear to be getting "priced in" as well
We don't rely on XBRL for parsing. It's not very consistent/reliable and its mostly for numeric content. We've definitely considered integrating ratios both into our dashboard. It isn't a current priority because ratios are already well supported elsewhere.
Aw cool! Can I hang out with your Dad? ;) We do pick up on overly promotional/jargon-y language to some extent. For the most part, however, word lists haven't worked for us.
1. "For example, in September 2020, our founder and former executive chairman, Trevor R. Milton, stepped down from his positions with us."
2. "During the fourth quarter of 2020, the Company ceased operations related to the Powersports business unit in order to focus on the Company's primary mission of commercial production of semi-trucks and construction of hydrogen fueling stations."
3. "As of December 31, 2020, we have $46.3 million of prepaid in-kind advisory services remaining which is expected to be consumed in 2021 and will be recorded as research and development expense until we reach commercial production."
Yes, it did. BUT here's the thing -> Nikola was first a SPAC and by the time it filed its first filing as Nikola, the Hidenburg report was already out so its not a true example of our algorithms preceding short reports. Our algos did beat Hidenburg to the punch on a number of other companies though.
Ooh I love MTL. That's the first place I lived in Canada. Great q. We used SEC enforcement actions related to fraud as our gold label (fairly common practice in academia). Really key thing here is that you need to be careful about what years you're using for training because if you include years that are too late in the fraud cycle, you end up with significant target leakage e.g. the filings we'll say, "we're being investigated for fraud". We ended up manually reviewing all of our data/labels. It took over a month. We also use settled class action lawsuits as silver labels. Plus a few other more frequent labels as bronze labels