Why the Best Investors Compare Everything

“Alpha is simply the Ability to Compare”. One of Australia’s best investors said this to us 15 years ago . In order to outperform the market, this fund manager needed to assess all available opportunities for mis-pricing in as comparable a manner as possible. The regulatory world of healthcare is a long way from the fast changing technology industry and both seem alien to oil & gas investors. But ultimately each stock represents an investment opportunity expressed in potential future returns and managers need a repeatable way of determining where the best opportunities reside. 

Calibre has been delivering comparability for over 20 years. We do this by turning unstructured data into structured and comparable information. Our platform enables this transformation to be driven by the unique investment process each investment team uses to create the precursor for Alpha.

Artificial Intelligence is just the latest technology which helps us achieve this goal for our users, but the creating structure out of the unstructured has a long history within Calibre.

Creating structure from the unstructured

Microsoft Excel Models

More than 20 years ago, Calibre built what today remains one of the most robust analyst Excel model management technologies in the market, used on both the buy side and sell side. Adapting version control ideas from the technology industry, customised for professional investors and analysts managing dozens, hundreds or thousands of spreadsheets.

Excel modelling of a company is one of the most unstructured and free-form analyses out there. We know, as we have helped hundreds of investors connect tens of thousands of excel models into the CalibreRMS platform. Analysts need the ability to express their understanding of a business in a completely unstructured manner – differing by analyst preference, industry, sector and company complexity. Ultimately however, these models need to be comparable and result in an agreed format of financial, valuation, risk and other outputs which can be loaded into a time series database, shared across the team and used comparably across all companies.

Mastering this process of taking unstructured Excel models into structured numerical outputs in a platform which allows both complete analyst freedom, portfolio manager comparability and a high trust in data integrity was the founding experience for the Calibre team to understand the value of structuring the unstructured.

Structuring the Unstructured – beyond analyst Excel models

Almost 10 years ago, cloud technology enabled CalibreRMS users to structure a whole lot more of their unstructured investment processes into a single platform. The benefits of using a single platform became multiplicative not additive. Suddenly investors could see their model outputs and valuations, and they could be compared across companies. They could be compared to detailed consensus of VisibleAlpha numbers. The analyst research notes which underpinned model forecast assumptions could be accessed in the same place. Investment positions and buy and sell decisions could be overlaid on the data. Investment thesis milestones, pre-mortems, post-mortems, pre-trade checklists, ESG scores, proxy voting decisions, engagement tracking, company conference calls. It could all be seen in the same place. Organised. Structured. Comparable.

The key features of the CalibreRMS platform which enable this include:

• Research Notes and Structured Notes: moving research out of Microsoft Word and OneNote into the cloud. Rich text notes which could be tagged to companies, portfolios or research themes. Notes which could have model outputs, consensus estimates, charts of valuation vs share price over time embedded within them. A full research note-taking platform configured to exactly how your investment process works.
• Scorecards: Scorecards enable teams to manually turn unstructured (how good are the management team?) into structured (Excellent, Good, Average, Below Average, Poor) which then creates the ability to rank, filter and compare. Now investors can look for companies with upside to valuation that only have Good or Excellent management teams. Scorecards are completely configurable – the only limit is the imagination of the team.
• Proxy Voting, ESG and Engagement Tracking: the information and decisions related to voting, ESG assessments and tracking of company engagements used to live in separate systems. The need to integrate these considerations into the investment process meant the integration into CalibreRMS was an obvious choice for many investment teams.
• Third Party Data: Proprietary internal research and insights are the most valuable information for an investment team. Comparing this to the market remains critical to the investment decision, which is why CalibreRMS integrates multiple third party data sources. Market data, company fundamentals, consensus estimates and ESG vendor data can all be integrated into the single client CalibreRMS environment.
• Time Series Engine: Underpinning all of the data in CalibreRMS is our proprietary time series engine database, deployed in every client environment to capture, time stamp and transform every event and data point in the system. This enables quantitative and qualitative data to exist in a single environment and insights to be comparable at a point in time and over time.
• Workbenches, Dashboards, Portfolios, Reports and Email Digests: A platform needs the ability to organise data, information and knowledge in a way that unlocks insight for users. CalibreRMS has an extensive, customisable range of ways investors can build views over their research in order to match not only their investment process, but how their team likes to work.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Like the cloud 10 years ago and Excel 20 years ago, AI today is a new tool which enhances CallibreRMS ability to turn unstructured data into structure and integrate into the investment process. We call this Calibre Intelligence.

New technology is interesting to Calibre for its ability to solve user problems. Fundamental investors have been drowning in more unstructured data than they can process, and these new technologies can help in very specific ways.

For example:

Extracting new insights from the library of internal research notes and surfacing hidden ideas across sectors buried deep in the research library,

Helping to prepare for company meetings by creating customised pre-meeting briefing notes using both public and proprietary team information,

Recording, transcribing and summarising meetings, conference calls and investor days and storing these with all other meeting notes and research in CalibreRMS

Creating intelligent abstracts of internal research notes that can be turned into a digest and emailed to the entire team (daily, weekly or monthly) to keep the team informed of new ideas,

Summarising actions across the portfolio (valuation updates, research notes, stock discussions, position changes, performance outcomes) into a monthly activity report either for the internal team or for clients,

Building automated scorecards which convert unstructured data (such as industry analysis) into a structured output (Porter Five Forces scores from 1 to 5),

Pro-actively making suggestions about new investment ideas which combine the investment process goals with companies which match those attributes within CalibreRMS.

The AI enabled features and tools Calibre is building are designed to solve client problems in ways not possible before this technology. 

Each Calibre Intelligence feature we release in the coming quarters has specific use cases in mind which have sat in the pile of unsolved or unsolvable problems for many years. We can now solve them.

The pace of AI understanding, investment and usage

In talking with clients, a distinct difference emerges between AI leaders and organisations still exploring or experimenting with its use in the investment process. Calibre are well equipped to engage with those at the beginning of the journey, and can also help those with more advanced AI programs.

Early exploration

As companies and investment teams start their journey – most often using internally sanctioned tools like Microsoft CoPilot – there are more questions than answers. Questions around security and governance. Questions around different AI models (CoPilot vs OpenAI vs Claude). Questions around using a chat interface vs direct API access vs integration into existing workflow tools (like CalibreRMS). Then of course there is all the new terminology. Cost per token, API Keys, MCP servers, context windows, RAG, reasoning models, fine-tuning, hallucinations, prompt and context engineering.

Calibre can help teams sort through this complexity to help simplify how AI can solve problems without needing to know all these technical details.

More advanced AI Teams

At the other end of the spectrum, we see investment teams pushing the boundaries of what AI can do and who have built sophisticated, proprietary internal systems. Investment edge for some firms will come from these AI investments and they are rightly going to keep them internal – however Calibre can still help.

• CalibreRMS as the Human Interface: Your team and organisation have built internal AI tooling which performs some unique investment or research task. Where do the outputs live? How do you capture and organise the insights? How do you compare them with your existing corpus of research? The CalibreRMS API enables you to maintain control over your AI research process and upload the outputs (whether they are text or numerical) into an appropriate Calibre artifact (research note, structured note, scorecard, data table) into the CalibreRMS system. These outputs can live alongside your existing human research in a platform where the investment team can benefit from both parts of your investment process – people and artificial intelligence.

• CalibreRMS as a proprietary corpus: Your organisation has built cutting edge AI but to maintain an edge over others with the same access to public market data you want to leverage the proprietary research data which lives in your research management system. Your research and meeting notes. Scorecards. Valuations. ESG and Sustainability assessments. Company engagements and proxy voting. Using the CalibreRMS API or MCP server, you can connect CalibreRMS information into your proprietary AI model as a high value source of context the model can access automatically.

Technology is always changing but the value fundamental investors can deliver by finding the best opportunities in the market will remain. e a foundation for enterprise-ready AI that regulators respect, clients trust, and analysts love.

Ready to build safer, faster research workflows? Talk to Calibre about Enterprise-Ready AI features today.