Why TIKR Is Not Your Typical Bloomberg Terminal Alternative

Benzinga will be holding its annual Benzinga Global Fintech Awards, a day of dealmaking, networking, and recognition in the financial technology space, on Nov. 10, 2020.

In recognition of those disruptive innovators creating positive and diverse change within the financial services space, Benzinga chatted with Bobby Sankhagowit, the founder at TIKR.

About TIKR

Traditional platforms for fundamental-focused investing are costly and don’t cater to the needs of sophisticated individual investors.

Filling the gap between institutions and retail investors is TIKR, a research platform with S&P Capital IQ-powered data on over 50,000 global companies. In the simplest way possible: TIKR’s end-to-end platform democratizes access to institutional-grade insights Wall Street has used for decades to analyze investments.

“Speaking to our target customers, it seemed like a lot of those individual investors sort of had to piece together this data from a lot of different websites, and the quality of the data they had access to was not quite at that institutional level,” the founder said. “We’re trying to bring those high-quality resources that Wall Street has used for many years to the individual investor."

See Also: Best Alternatives to Bloomberg Terminal

Core Product Portfolio

TIKR’s fundamental investing platform provides users with a machine-driven solution to screen, build models, and valuate companies using financial estimates, transcripts, filings, among other pieces of data.

Pictured: TIKR’s Financial Estimates tool.

The company’s core product portfolio consists of the following:

• 15 years of high-quality financial data on over 50,000 global companies.
• Idea generation via AI-driven stock recommendations, screeners, watchlists, and tools to track top Wall Street Investors’ picks.
• Earnings or conference call transcripts and filings, as well as analyst ratings.
• Curated real-time financial news and analysis on global companies.

TIKR’s founder told Benzinga traditional institutional platforms like Bloomberg are great, but lack innovation.

“You know, there’s a lot of data, but there’s nothing really from an automation or valuation processes [standpoint]," he said. "You still need analysts to export the data to Excel and then use that data to build a model. Our idea is to build this powerful tool to help automate a lot of the analysis."

Use Case, Recent Developments

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic highlighted the need for community in the financial services space. TIKR took note and amped up its efforts around platform communication.

“Existing discussion boards like Yahoo! Finance, and so forth, have a lot of amateur investors that dilute the quality of the content on those discussion boards,” the founder said. “We really want to curate a community of sophisticated investors.”

Thus far, the company’s initiative has been successful, according to Sankhagowit. Many of the platform’s users are former buy- and sell-side analysts that can’t afford to pay $20,000 per year for a Bloomberg terminal; “They’re looking for a better alternative, and I think that’s where we come in.”

Additionally, the firm released a tool for tracking the performance of over 20,000 sophisticated funds and investment managers, allowing users to generate ideas from proven methods.

Pictured: TIKR’s Tracking Gurus tool.

Innovation Outlook

“As we’re in Beta, everything we’re doing at TIKR is really kind of built ground-up from what our customers are telling us.”

Going forward, TIKR has a robust roadmap for building an end-to-end platform where users can analyze and manage their investments: “We hope to automate the process from idea generation through analysis and managing portfolios.”

Additionally, “our longer term vision is to build a hyper-focused community that people can come to and exchange ideas.”