Investment firms are leveraging technology to distribute proprietary research to portfolio managers, as well as track performance of trade ideas sent internally on trading desks and between buy- and sell-side firms.

“Traditional factors driving the adoption of enterprise technology tools also apply to research management,” Douglas Laurie, global product manager of equities at Bloomberg, told Markets Media. “Investment firms want to encourage collaboration and information sharing between global offices and employees.”

Bloomberg’s research platform enables buyside institutions to integrate internal content with over 2,500 other third-party research sources available on the Bloomberg Professional service.

By acting as a single source for content, data and analytics, the platform is engineered to help investment firms publish, store and distribute internal research across teams. “It’s a consolidated and hosted platform for instant access to an ecosystem of specialized expertise,” Laurie said.

The kind of research that is typically distributed includes meeting notes, company overviews and valuation models. This research can be distributed as either PC documents for download or text carried on an internal newswire that is also available on the Bloomberg Professional service.

The platform also acts as a real-time source of information for analyst reports and estimates, so teams can collaborate globally by sharing ideas and tracking what other analysts in the community are saying.

“With this research platform, Bloomberg provides a single system that can trace trade ideas from the original source, through to the sharing of these ideas, to the execution of the trade and to the management of position in an OMS,” said Laurie.

ING Investment Management has adopted Bloomberg’s research management platform to share ideas globally and track the effectiveness of trade ideas.

Investment managers are notified via the Bloomberg message system when new trade ideas are generated or modified by their analysts. ING can also analyze its own research and estimates alongside broker and independent content to gauge where they stand relative to consensus.