
The results
So far, FCFI has trained Affinity to recognise, follow and capture 36 trend topics.
Affinity captures more than 35 million records annually, allowing FERI to assess short and long-term trends and support investors to make decisions more efficiently and transparently, with less risk.
As a result, FCFI has defined three main factors which allow it to translate data into insights that are easy to visualise and integrate with its fundamental data:
- Trend topic growth — based on the idea of a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) to determine longer-term trend rates for each theme
- A “Z-score” that represents short-term changes within a theme
- “Share of World” as a normalised topic frequency compared to overall news coverage
FCFI used these three factors to set up a FERI Trend Radar data matrix that places each trend in one of four quadrants of increasing priorities – Latent Topic, Emerging Trend, Mainstream Adoption, and Supernova.
With CID’s system, the FERI Trend Radar allows the firm to unlock Thematic Intelligence — quickly and easily assessing the relevance and potential staying power of trends, all contextualised within recent developments on a macro level.

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