Thomson Reuters Introduces First Of Its Kind Investor Prediction Tool

Smart Targets Provides Full Transparency Into Factors Driving Buying and Selling Behavior

New York, NY – Thomson Reuters today introduced a first of its kind tool to assess investor interest and risk -- Smart Targets. Designed to meet the needs of investor relations professionals worldwide, Smart Targets is a quant-driven application that shows the fit between an institutional investor and a company, including an ability to identify those investors with a high probability of buying, as well as existing holders at risk of selling. In addition to being the only tool in the market able to assess investor risk, Smart Targets is unique as it provides transparency into the factors driving investor interest. This insight allows investor relations professionals to better understand and analyze investor behavior and improve the focus of their outreach to their investor base.

“Smart Targets was created in direct response to the needs of our customers,” said Bill Haney, Head of Investor Relations Services, Thomson Reuters. “Some investor relations officers want more fact-based insight into their holders while others are looking for alternative guidance on where to focus their outreach. Smart Targets delivers the needed insight for all our customers by applying science to understand investor behavior and providing data-driven transparency into why certain investors are attracted to the shares of a company.”

Smart Targets is the only model in the market that analyzes the existing shareholder base differently from prospective investors as research has shown that different factors predict the behavior of each. Unlike traditional approaches to understanding investor behavior, Smart Targets does not analyze select factors independently of one another. Instead, the model incorporates key factors such as fundamentals, potential holdings, saturation, momentum, turnover, investor characteristics and peer holdings including analyst, industry and fundamental peers. Smart Targets provides visibility into which factors are driving an investor’s behavior, providing a new level of insight and differentiated analytics into Thomson Reuters market-leading content.

The sophisticated predictive algorithm at the heart of Smart Targets was developed over a number of years by the Thomson Reuters StarMine team of quantitative researchers skilled in building stock prediction models for the buy side. Smart Targets is truly global and dynamic, automatically accounting for changes in market conditions and investor fundamentals each week. The operative models were back tested using 10 years of global ownership data measured against buy side trading patterns. The results indicate that investors identified by Smart Targets purchased up to 90 times more shares than the traditional approach of targeting the largest investors.

Smart Targets is a product of the Corporate Services business of Thomson Reuters which provides more than 6,000 corporations worldwide with information, analytics and workflow solutions that enable decision making and drive performance. The solutions increase the efficiency and effectiveness of decision making across the investor relations, corporate communications, public relations, business intelligence and corporate finance functions.
Thomson Reuters

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