Buyside AI Reviews

Maybe a an offset to the post covid hiring boom more than anything else?

Tempted to buy Factset $FDS here at 11x 2027E earnings … everyone acting like it’s a foregone conclusion Claude is going to eat all finance data providers.

Portrait Analytics - Review #1 (AI Tools for Finance) This week I tried Portrait Analytics, an AI-powered investment research platform for institutional equity investors. Here's what I found.

www.buysideaireviews.com/p/portrait-a...

A real example of why you should be careful when using general-purpose LLMs for investment research below:

The brilliance of LLMs is that the output always sounds professional and thorough, but that’s also the danger.

Portrait Analytics - Review #1 (AI Tools for Finance) This week I tried Portrait Analytics, an AI-powered investment research platform for institutional equity investors. Here's what I found.

www.buysideaireviews.com/p/portrait-a...

This is also a good example of the type of value finance-specific AI platforms can provide vs. general purpose LLMs.

Incorporating criteria such as “companies where there has been a clear positive inflection in management tone over the past year” or “companies where management has indicated industry conditions are at a trough” can make screening for new ideas much more effective.

Bottom line is that these types of screens can pick up stories/themes in a way simple quantitative Bloomberg/CapIQ screens can’t.

The restructuring franchise also adds a countercyclical element to earnings here. Trading at 16.5x 2027E EPS puts it on the lower end of EBs (looking at PJT and EVR in particular) – I’m going to be doing some work on this one.

Given the state of the private markets (exits hard to come by in both PE and PC) this does seem like a pretty big potential opportunity to me with upside beyond management estimates (but perhaps the offset is a decline in traditional M&A volume/fees?).

This screen picked up management describing the opportunity as “a couple hundred million” on the Q2 2025 earnings call which would represent~17% of the revenue Moelis reported in FY 2024.

Moelis & Co ($MC) is a company that comes up on this screen (see Exhibit below) - they launched a new secondaries/fund-level financing advisory business in 2025 and made some significant new hires for that franchise.

“…will soon be launching, or have launched within the last Q, a discrete, significant new product, which has large upside potential for the entire company…and management must have explicitly quantified the expected opportunity from the launch, which must represent >10% of existing company revenue”

This screen combined quantitative criteria (stock performance <0% over past year), with qualitative criteria that narrowed the search to companies that...

An example of this is a “New Product Launches Not Priced In” screen I ran running using the Portrait Analytics platform.

Using AI for investment idea generation: semantic screening.

A great AI use case for me has been incorporating semantic (qualitative) search criteria into traditional quantitative screens.

Not sure that AI efficiencies drive a sudden step change in an area where AUM (+ expertise/mandate flexibility of course) is a big competitive advantage.

...it will continue to be incredibly difficult to compete as a small firm given the importance of both (i) large position sizes and (ii) ability to quickly provide/structure new money, in being on the right side of LMEs (ie. not being left out of the majority group in non-pro rata transactions).

While this may be true from a pure budget perspective, my view is that in the distressed/opportunistic credit space especially...

Human connection still needed in credit investing AI is a natural technology for the industry, but traders and investors still need to stress-test strategies with experts

Good piece on AI for credit document analysis.

One line I disagree with to some extent is - "smaller investing firms can suddenly compete with bigger firms".

www.ft.com/content/b42f...

(This is not a sponsored post. One of the goals of this account is simply to highlight cool AI platforms for finance by showing examples of their actual capabilities via detailed write ups.)

The full write up is live on the website (no paywall) and includes sample outputs from Portrait’s case study, screening, deep research, and monitors features.

(These limitations include prompting gymnastics, inconsistent sources/outputs, lack of access to high quality information sources).

The founding team at Portrait incorporated investing experience at Baupost and Slate Path to design a platform that addresses some of the limitations and frictions of using general-purpose LLMs for investment research

This week’s review is focused on Portrait Analytics, an AI-powered investment research platform for public equity investors. I’ve been using Portrait for the past couple of weeks and found it to be especially helpful for getting up to speed on new ideas.

But exploiting this dynamic led to today's high level of exposure to software over time that will be tough to deal with. Perhaps we see more mez type capital come in as a solution to address parts of this maturity wall as 1L lenders underwrite lower LTVs, but I am not sure that bid is there...

while "true leverage" represented by debt/UFCF or debt/EBITDA-capex was not as egregious vs. broadly syndicated loans given higher capital intensity in the overall lev loans index (BCRED often highlighted this discrepancy in "true leverage" vs. public markets in their marketing materials).

(whereas high headline leverage would constrain access to public markets as a result of CCC ratings/limited appetite for ~6-7+ handle headline leverage)

Given capital light nature of software, there was a kind of "arb" where private credit was able to underwrite high "headline leverage" represented by debt/EBITDA multiples for software companies

Will be very interesting to see how private credit funds come to terms with their outsized software exposure (greater than a 20% weighting in Blackstone and HPS private credit portfolios as an example).