FirstRain, a provider of search technology to hedge funds and asset managers, has introduced FirstRain Management Monitor, which it describes as a new class of qualitative analytics for professional investors.
“There is a great deal of information on the Web from which it is possible to detect important patterns [which reflect] quality of management, the tenor of management and whether or not a company executive is on strategy,” says Penny Herscher, president and CEO, Foster City, FirstRain.
Though these are all leading indicators of a company’s performance, notes Herscher, an algorithm-based search engine can identify the patterns and trends much faster than a human investor.
“Just as, over the last 20 years, the field of quantitative analytics has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry, we are now seeing the genesis of systems designed to derive analytics from the base pools of qualitative information on the Web,” adds Herscher.