When the World Cup kicks off June 14, your news feeds will likely be chock full of alerts on football teams, players and data. Even if you’re not a hardcore fan of “the beautiful game,” the tournament will be hard to escape. Luckily, there is a wealth of easily accessible information to get you up to speed ahead of the first match between Russia and Saudi Arabia. It’ll be easy to dig up match stats, tournament standings and every imaginable piece of information on players from 32 countries, from Argentina’s global superstar Lionel Messi to obscure Icelandic forward Kolbeinn Sigthorsson.
Why isn’t it just as easy to do this with global investment research?
Sharp budgetary cuts to analyst desks and regulatory changes affecting research providers in developed, emerging and frontier markets effectively red-carded these providers from distributing their products. New rules such as MiFID II put most local broker research into home-country pools that keep them from competing globally. It is these trend lines that has led to our founding and the development of the Nucleus195 platform.
Our platform provides a solution allowing investors to glean locally sourced investment research from Australia to Zimbabwe as easily as they get the odds for every match in the World Cup. Nucleus195 – named for the 195 countries in the United Nations — provides a complete ecosystem for obtaining and managing investment research from content providers of all stripes from every market.
Portfolio managers considering overlooked opportunities in developed markets or seeking out stocks in frontier and emerging markets need locally sourced research. In investing and football, the value of boots on the ground cannot be overstated. Reliable local insight supports ideas that give investors a complete picture across markets, as independent research providers bridge a detrimental “information gap” created by cutbacks and high costs from bulge bracket research desks.
Scant information has a knock-on effect:
- Investors don’t like unknowns and will in turn, limit investment in areas where information is hard to obtain;
- The increased return opportunity isn’t always enough of a risk premium to overcome developed market manager’s hesitation;
- Less capital deployed leads to lower trading liquidity – which then increases investment risk, and less capital is deployed;
- Less capital deployed limits limiting growth and opportunities when companies have a harder time raising funds in public markets.
What content providers and investment managers need most is sustainable access to transparently priced, locally sourced research on a level playing field across all the world’s markets. In today’s connected world, market information should be as accessible, robust and easy to manage as it is from the sporting world. That’s the mission that Nucleus195 is embarking on.
In anticipation of our platform launch later this summer, we will be tracking the World Cup action from an investing point of view. Follow us through the tournament on LinkedIn and Twitter via #WorldCupOfResearch and see how global football and global investing align.
To learn more about the Nucleus195 platform, visit www.nucleus195.com.