Investigative skills for investment analysts

  • Takeaways from our expert seminar held on August 16th, 2018

As an intelligent investment analyst, we must be able to verify facts and understand the management of those companies we are researching on. Our guest speaker, Thomas, presents some pointers during the recent “Investigative Due Diligence Workshop” organised by Springboard. Below, we have summarised some tips for students who have missed the event.

1. Use more than one search engine

When you search about an entity or person, using Google search is not enough. You may wish to try Yahoo, Bing, or even a local language search engine. Some of the content regarding a particular person could be purged by public relations people in one search engine but not in another. Therefore there’s a chance that one of the search engines still keeps a cache of the content that you are interested in.

2. Be patient when unlocking clues

Some wealthy people may employ an army of public relations people to ‘bury’ their bad news, you may only be able to find some negative news about them after digging through more than 10 pages of search results.

3. Use your charm and talk to different sources

 

You could be chatting up the salespeople from a company, who are residing at an overseas branch. By asking them their sales target for the year and how it is compared to last year, you can form a more accurate view of the company’s country revenues.

4. Do reverse directorship search

In Indonesia, you can do a reverse directorship search using a voucher bought from a bank. One then uses a long string of passcode to get data on a director. However, it may get harder as data on individual persons once the protection laws kick in.

5. Find out more about a person using his or her Facebook profile

You may not be a friend of the person on Facebook, but it is possible to find out about the person’s habits or even interesting rantings of this person. It could provide clues to the company that he or she is working for.

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