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Data-Driven Fundamentals: The Path to Investment Enlightenment
Challenge: Managing Information Overload
For leveraged loan investors, speed and accuracy in financial data analysis can mean the difference between winning and missing a deal. Yet, gathering and synthesizing financial data is a time-consuming process. Analysts often spend hours copying and pasting from scattered documents just to prepare models—time that could be spent making investment decisions.
One investment firm, managing a mid-sized CLO portfolio, needed a way to process financial data more efficiently, synthesize insights faster, and gain deeper visibility into private company financials. Without these capabilities, their team risked being too slow to react to market changes.
Outcome: Automating Data Retrieval for Deeper Insight
In order to meet and overcome these challenges, the team decided to onboard Octus Fundamentals Data, which provides the most comprehensive coverage of leveraged loan and high yield bond data on the market. By introducing Fundamentals, the firm eliminated hours of manual data work with its powerful Excel plugin and financial database. Instead of painstakingly extracting data from PDFs, analysts now instantly pull current and historical data into their models. One of the analysts familiar with the product integrations highlighted the amount of time and money saved, explaining: “These investment professionals who get paid a whole lot of money spend an unbelievable amount of time copying and pasting from PDFs. It’s—you’d be shocked. And everyone, everyone in the world thinks that’s ridiculous. The Fundamentals Excel plugin essentially takes away all copying and pasting on a kind of daily basis.”
Beyond automation, Fundamentals provided a deep transcript library, giving the firm access to earnings call transcripts that were previously out of reach. This allowed analysts to track management sentiment, future forecasts, and hidden risks across multiple earnings cycles, rather than relying on a single call.
With Fundamentals, the firm has reduced time spent on manual data collection, allowing analysts to spend more time on high-value analysis. The automated financial modeling and transcript library have empowered the team to move quickly, gain deeper insights, and make better-informed investment decisions.
The result? More competitive bids, better risk assessments, and improved portfolio management. Fundamentals didn’t just improve workflow efficiency—it transformed how the firm operates, ensuring they stay ahead of the market with faster, sharper, and more strategic credit decisions.