finnCap Tech Chat | finnCap and the Holy Grail

It’s a strange thing that the largest transactions you’ll tend to make on a personal basis are for items you are often allowed only very little time to familiarise yourself with beforehand. Time spent in the house you’re looking to secure a 25-year debt burden for and maybe bring up a family in, or in a car you trust to get you and those you love from A to B for several years, alive, is little relative to the amount shelled out. It’s not like being in your cocky teens when you simply don’t know what you don’t know, it’s that you’re unable to experience what you need to know.
 

So when it comes to tech stocks what do you need to know? What the software does, so you can see if anyone will actually buy/ use / keep on using it? What the house analysts think, maybe, and how their thought has evolved over their combined 50+ years of experience in tech research? Relative performance against similar stocks, and relative valuations on a variety of metrics? When they are next reporting and when did they last or will they next comment on trading?

Yes, obviously, all of the above, but it’s difficult to get all of that in one place. MiFID has destroyed widespread access to research despite the notable increase in retail participation. Unless you're a specialist in a particular type of software, one struggles to understand what it looks like, what it does, who will buy it and whether they keep using it, even if you meet company management twice a year. On valuation, companies themselves are often blind to specialist valuation sources, and non-specialist investors may not have sectors or sources set up in such detail. Are they historically highly valued? How do you see relative valuations for the niche of smaller tech companies <£1.5bn, where growth can be explosive over the years? And before you buy (or sell), when do they next report, and should you give it a week in case they say something? So many questions...

Now, your prayers have been answered, and the paragons of virtue within the finnCap tech research team have created a single source of information just for you, the finnCap Tech Hub:
 

• The indices page gives you the chance to consider our fC Tech 40 Index and fC Next 50 indices, consisting of the top 90 listed tech stocks <£1.5bn in the UK. Data back to 2014 gives performance, gross or rebased; valuations on all standard metrics; and sub-sector analytics, to show eg enterprise software vs managed services/telcos, quite a disparity.
• The calendar page is for investors to see what is going to happen and what has happened already, but also for companies and advisors to see who else is reporting that day, eg if the news is going to get lost in a melee of announcements from Tuesday obsessed boards, and the consequent bun-fight to grab an analyst meeting time.
• The companies page gives context for market cap and price, and access to all our research on our corporate stocks. Our research is available to professional, non-MIFID and MIFID investors; and your pub landlord, your next-door neighbour, your dog and your Mum – which is vital in the age of stockbroker disintermediation and bulletin board influences. If retail is uninformed by a company’s broker as to strategy and forecast, that’s a peculiar attitude to supporting a share price with full information.
• The demos page does what it says on the tin. Without reading it twice at least, if you’re not in the marketing and PR industry, do you really know what “Spot patterns and opportunities in behavioural and conversation data with industry-specific vertical AI on our audience insights platform” means? Look at the demo for a run-through of Access Intelligence’s Pulsar Platform and you will instantly understand (and be impressed). Similarly for Aferian (formerly Amino); D4T4’s new FDP; dotdigital’s Engagement Cloud; Fonix mobile payments and messaging platform; Intercede’s MyID credentials and identity management; IQGeo’s geospatial location platform; KRM22’s Global Risk Platform; Proactis’ bePayd accelerated payment facility platform; and Tremor’s TV focused advertising platform; with many more still to come.
• Finally, an archive ofTech Chat, this being our 359th edition since launch in 2009. This tab will be less novel to you lot, I guess. What other brokers deliver consistency on that level? or even humdingers to make your day easier, like the finnCap Tech Hub.

Alleluia, you say. Can we do one for your next house or car purchase? Nah, sorry, your next tech stock consideration will be far better assessed.

Happy Friday!