Winter Release 2023

The Winter Release will go live on 23 February 2023. Here is an overview of what it includes:

• Improved theme exposure from the news: top theme-exposed and pure players based on news reporting
• New: Fundamental theme exposure based on SEC filings, event transcripts, company information, and company websites.
• News API improvements provide more flexibility to query news content.
• Minor improvements and fixes

News Exposure 2.0 – improved top scores and a new purity score assist in finding the most prominent and the actual pure plays

Portfolio managers use Affinity to quantify theme exposures for companies helping them to create thematic investment baskets. Domain experts and research analysts use ThemeScape to model themes. Exposure scores are available via ThemeScape and the Affinity API.

With the Winter release, we enable portfolio managers to identify thematic leaders and, most importantly, pure players more efficiently and with greater transparency.

Affinity now provides two types of exposure scores:

• Top exposure based on the frequency of theme-related news reporting about a company
• Pure exposure based on the frequency of theme-related news reporting relative to all other reporting about a company

A visual percentile indicator shows where a company ranks based on its top or pure exposure to a specific theme. Numeric scores are available via ThemeScape and API. ThemeScape users may add columns in the Explorer view to show single or all exposure scores.

Strategy Builder allows filtering by top and pure exposure percentiles.

Fundamental Exposure – leverage SEC filings, event transcripts, company information, and company websites to find the actual thematic leaders

In addition to theme exposure scores based on news reporting, Affinity now supports the assessment of theme exposures based on SEC filings, event transcripts, company information, and company websites. We call this “fundamental exposure” as it leverages a company’s disclosures and filings. It will also increase theme exposure coverage for companies with less to no news reporting.

More precisely, fundamental exposure uses:

• Company descriptions as available from the Affinity ThemeGraph, based on FactSet, the GLEIF project, Wikipedia, national company registers, and other sources
• Event transcripts as available via FactSet
• SEC filings: 10-K forms
• Company websites for MSCI All World index constituents, more coming soon

A visual percentile indicator shows where a company ranks based on its fundamental exposure to a specific theme. Numeric scores are available via ThemeScape and API. ThemeScape users may add columns in the Explorer view to show single or all exposure scores.

Strategy Builder allows filtering by fundamental exposure percentile.

News API 2.0 – provide end-users with more relevant news reporting

Affinity’s News API provides streamlined access to a continuous feed of web-crawled news reports. It used to allow filtering by time to receive the most recent or older stories.

News API now supports filtering by specific organizations and individuals, in addition to the time. This new parameter simplifies downstream application integration significantly (e.g., when adding news to CRM records).

As an additional parameter, API users may switch the built-in deduplication on or off to receive the most relevant stories or all available content. All content will still include Affinity’s deduplication information to support efficient noise reduction within downstream applications.

Minor Improvements and Fixes

• Headquarters locations: When filtering companies by location, results included companies with subsidiaries at those locations in some cases. We fixed this to filter strictly by headquarters locations.
• FactSet RBICS data: In some cases, RBICS revenue information may exceed 100% or be negative on 2nd or lower hierarchy levels, which is by intention. We added information providing clarity and explanation for ThemeScape users.

Interested to learn more? Need more details? Contact us here.