December 28, 2017

2017's Most Trusted Financial Firms, Most Loved Retailers, and Most Innovative Tech Companies

The social media herd can turn on a dime, praising a company one month and then trashing its reputation the next (see Papa John's, below).  The past year has seen many such ups and downs, and this article looks at a few of those the herd ranked highest.

MarketPsych's patented natural language processing engine quantifies emotions and themes expressed in relation to a universe of over 12,000 global companies, 45 currencies, 187 countries, and 36 commodities.  The software scans articles and posts in over 800 financial social media sources and 2,000 premium news sites.  The Thomson Reuters MarketPsych Indices (TRMI) data feed results from this analysis.  The TRMI is utilized by the world's top funds, banks, and government agencies for asset allocation and investment research.

Using the TRMI data, we performed a year-end analysis to ascertain the top global companies as described in financial social media.  Of a pool of 12,000 global companies tracked, we ranked only those mentioned on average more than 10 times daily in social media.  We then ranked and identified the Most Trusted financial firms, the Most Loved retailers (consumer cyclicals), and the Most Innovative technology companies.

While global real estate and infrastructure investment firm Brookfield Asset Management was surpassed this year as the largest global real estate investor, the company remained the most widely trusted and admired financial stock by investors commenting in social media.
 
MOST TRUSTED GLOBAL FINANCIAL FIRMS  
Rank Company Name PermID Daily Average Buzz
1 Brookfield Asset Management Inc 4295861073 15
2 First Commonwealth Financial Corp 4295903989 24
3 Banco Bradesco SA 4295859689 31
4 Bursa Malaysia Bhd 4298007917 100
5 Zions Bancorp 4295908520 13

Papa John's pizza may be loved by college students - a viral social media story this year described how a woman's love of Papa John's pizza helped her admission to Yale - but investors are not loving the share price action.  2016 was a terrific year for the stock, and it entered 2017 propelled by investor love.  In true contrarian fashion, it cooled off in 2017, compounded by the CEO's tone deaf statement in November 2017 blaming declining pizza sales on NFL player protests.
  
MOST LOVED RETAILERS (CONSUMER CYCLICALS)    
Rank Company Name PermID Daily Average Buzz
1 Papa John's International Inc 4295907538 41
2 Lotte Shopping Co Ltd 4295882694 16
3 Hero MotoCorp Ltd 4295872666 64
4 Valentino Fashion Group SpA 4295875855 44
5 adidas AG 4295868725 124

InsideSales.com is an innovative private technology company offering a AI-powered sales acceleration platform - Neuralytics - a predictive self-learning engine (they also innovate new sales jargon).  They raised a $50 million investment round this year with contributions from Microsoft, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, and others.
 
MOST INNOVATIVE TECH COMPANIES    
Rank Company Name PermID Daily Average Buzz
1 Insidesales.Com Inc 5001431724 13
2 TechnologyOne Ltd 4295858443 19
3 Polycom Inc 4295907621 20
4 Wipro Ltd 4295873558 202
5 Stratasys Ltd 4296483321 51

Of the many TRMI, innovation has among the strongest correlations with future stock price performance.

We hope you've found these profiles interesting.  Top investment firms are using platforms like InsideSales.com's Neuralytics, fed with data like TRMI, to produce significant investment outperformance.  Please reach out to your Thomson Reuters account manager for more information about the TRMI data set.

Best Wishes for 2018!
Richard Peterson and the MarketPsych Team!