Slater Victoroff

It's called LAW, the Lab of Forward Thinking, which is sort of this small group of 20 or 30 people within Manulife whose job it is to go out and find emerging technologies and figure out if there's a way to kind of apply them to real business use cases.

And what we did with them is we actually... They're a really wonderful team.

It was actually very...

Very happy to work with them.

And we put together a really, really strong bond sort of over about a year that we've been working together.

So their main goal is they wanted to give their investment analysts a better way to read through sort of these large quarterly and annual reports.

And these can be anywhere from dozens to hundreds of pages, depending on the company and sort of how rigorous their reporting is.

And just reading through that for an investment analyst is extremely time consuming, extremely tiring, especially when, you know, searching through the whole thing.

key pieces of information.

Like what?

So the numbers.

So it'll be things like, oh, they missed earnings.

There was some change in leadership, right?

So of the, you know, let's say you've got 200 page annual reports.

Of those 200 page reports, you know, 80 to 90% of the report is going to be nearly identical.

Legally.

Like legalese, but more like, you know, here's our earnings section and it follows the same format.

But the interesting thing that we found, right, is that even though each analyst only cares about maybe five to 10% about what's in that report, that 5% is different for each analyst, right?

Fundamentally based, right, I might only care about changes in leadership.

If I'm a very quantitative investor, then I might care very much about earnings, but I don't care so much about the leadership.