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[AI applications have been embedded across all areas of the financial services industry, including investment research. The need is clearly there as the investment markets offer a large quantity of data, research, and tools producing information whose actual value in risk management and generating alpha can be unclear, unproven, and difficult to test and validate.
AI is being added to massive data platforms as an insight tool to explore and extract market intelligence, factual insights, next-best-actions, and now, as AI Agents, it can be designed to personally assist an investment manager in their proprietary investment research process.
To explore how AI is being strategically applied to investment management research, we reached out to Institute Founding member Rocco Pellegrinelli, CEO of Trendrating – a modern investment performance management platform combining leading-edge technology and advanced analytics providing AI-driven factual alpha discovery and risk management. I asked him questions to understand how portfolio managers and advisors can profit from this powerful combination of market intelligence research and AI optimization.]
Hortz: What are the investment management challenges that you are trying to solve through your modernized research platform?
Pellegrinelli: Delivering superior investment performance is the key challenge and the problem is the questionable value produced by conventional data, research, tools, and terminals. Investors need and deserve information whose value is real, measurable, and can be tested and validated. The mission of Trendrating is empowering a sound investment discovery process to unveil critical insights with a demonstrable impact on performance.
Through our advanced analytics, AI-powered technology, and research platform data design, we enable professional investors to filter out market noise, subjective opinions, and disputable research to deliver clear, actionable insights that can be dynamically tested for advanced alpha discovery and validating price trends.
Of particular benefit for investment research is to also strategically redesign the research process for speed and be able to quickly and efficiently, with a few clicks, and now with a dedicated AI Assistant, to unveil factual insights that can have a measurable impact on performance. The impact of our tech-enabled “performance management” research platform is fully measurable and trackable in the Trendrating system.
Hortz: Can you explain your thoughts or mindset behind how you are applying modern tech and redefining the investment research process for equity portfolios?
Pellegrinelli: As a former portfolio manager, I was not satisfied with what traditional tools could offer. Many analytical tools make sense but do they also make money? I wanted to redefine how professional investors approach alpha generation and risk management to introduce a new way to look at portfolio intelligence.
The tools and models used by many investment professionals I feel are outdated. The focus is too much on conventional metrics while ignoring ongoing market dynamics like trend strength/direction and dispersion. While mangers have a wealth of data, most of it explains what happened, not what is happening. The market does not move based soley on fundamentals. It reflects sentiment, momentum, and patterns. It is not about forecasting the future – it is about aligning portfolios with real-time truths that the market is already revealing.
This mindset shift allows professional investors to determine what works and what does not – and the ability to better navigate volatility, detect genuine market signals, and look at alpha as a measurable pursuit and the new defining edge for investment managers.
Hortz: How specifically did you design AI technology into your research platform?
Pellegrinelli: Before we can answer the tech design issue of your question, it is important to know that a key investment research objective is to profit from the performance dispersion across stocks; separating the outperformers from the losers. The probability of success is higher when one combines the most productive fundamentals with the objective validation of price trends.
Fact-finding on fundamentals – Discovering the fundamental parameters that perform best, beyond assumptions and opinions, requires massive historical tests of any possible combinations to unveil the winning mix for different investment universes and a data research platform design to be able to do that quickly and efficiently.
Enhanced price trend validation and capture – Respecting trends is also important. Dismissing a sound trend sanity check is unwise. We assess the actual trends of stocks and sectors using advanced analytics and AI analysis capabilities to discriminate for bull versus bear trends by measuring the buying versus the selling pressures, the foundation of trend developments, and any positive or negative undercurrents of stock activity developing under the surface that may be driven by institutional activity or market disruptions starting to take effect.
Our core belief is simple: understanding and respecting price trends is not optional – it is essential. Market research needs to reflect fundamentals but also sentiment, momentum, and patterns that often precede headline events.
An intelligent combination of the right fundamentals and a filtering out of negative trends is our recipe for better returns, stronger risk control, and enhanced compliance.
Hortz: How did you design your AI Assistant to support managers in their research process?
Pellegrinelli: We recently designed and launched an AI agent to personally assist an investment manager on how to best navigate the vast market data and research capabilities on our platform. Our new AI Assistant is a fully conversational tool crafted to offer guidance of best practices on the selection process, explain the best use of the wealth of information and analytics, provide tips on how to maximize returns and reduce portfolio risks, and make platform navigation faster, easier, and more intuitive.
Unlike traditional help features, this AI Assistant understands plain language, allowing users to ask questions naturally and receive clear, actionable guidance. Whether a manager is looking to validate investment ideas, spotting new risks, wants to build and validate active strategies and bespoke model portfolios, our AI assistant delivers step-by-step instructions tailored to their needs. What sets this AI assistant apart is its ability to continuously learn and improve, adapting to your workflows, and becoming an increasingly valuable resource over time.
The AI Assistant even acts to guide managers towards investment insights that matter, including how to use more dynamic information from the platform for ongoing testing for Alpha Discovery – the alpha impacts from your current investment strategies or to build new rules-based systematic strategies.
Hortz: What do you see as to the trend of new investment technology adoption across the industry?
Pellegrinelli: The asset management industry is definitely evolving toward the use of better tools and solutions as the pressure on performance, fees, and costs are forcing people to adjust the game plan. It is time to give investors a new paradigm of actual, verifiable value.
This is our commitment – better information, better decisions, better performance – and our mission is to inspire investment managers to be open to adopt new investment technologies. We currently offer managers extended free trials to demonstrate and prove with facts how our advanced AI price trend analytics and alpha discovery research platform can provide enhanced market intelligence, strengthen risk management, and improve investment performance for any manager, using any investment methodology, on an ongoing basis.
We are also particularly excited about the launch of our AI Assistant as this tech enhancement represents a significant step forward in how investment professionals can interact with and benefit from a research platform.
This article was originally published here and is republished on Wealthtender with permission.
About the Author
Bill Hortz
Founder Institute for Innovation Development
To make Wealthtender free for readers, we earn money from advertisers, including financial professionals and firms that pay to be featured. This creates a conflict of interest when we favor their promotion over others. Read our editorial policy and terms of service to learn more. Wealthtender is not a client of these financial services providers.
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