CFA institute needs to cool it with the thinly veiled advertisements masquerading as articles.

It’s true that some firms are selling NLP tools to analyze shareholder reports. Most of these tools just look for keywords, in spite of the hype and marketing claims of more sophisticated techniques. There are some tools using more sophisticated techniques, but they are small in number and very few people know how to use them properly.

If CFA institute wanted to actually educate members, they might mention that the exact same tools can be used to polish up company publications. Where is the balance in this advertisement come blog post?

Don’t kid yourself into thinking senior management doesn’t hire speech coaches, marketing wizards, advertising executives, PR teams, and yes... consultants that specialize in NLP techniques.

Your firm can spend thousands buying an NLP tool and buying the training or consultants to figure out how to use said tool. Just know that companies are already hiring consultants, in many cases the same consultants, to sanitize and homogenize their publications. It is an arms race, and bayside is playing catch-up, not getting ahead.

Also know that all this polishing and sanitizing and homogenizing tends to make these reports even more vanilla than they are already.

Too bad CFA institute doesn’t tell both sides of the story... it might help if they hired members to write articles, instead of having freelance journalists and (worse) vendors write them. A few days ago, enterprising investor actually had a blog post advocating pay day loans!!!