Market screeners and data-driven decision making

Our next presenter is Heidi Kuthbert, CEO at Grafa.

Heidi founded Grafa, a fast-growing finance media technology company, and is the co-founder of the Grafa data and finance app, which covers ASX's top 200 companies, fast-growing startups, and cryptocurrency companies.

Her presentation topic today is market screeners and data-driven decision-making.

Welcome to the presentation, Heidi.

Thanks, Angelina.

Thanks for having me and thanks everyone for watching.

I'm going to talk you through a little bit about how you can get the data edge over your investment strategy.

Where I started is I worked for Bloomberg for a long time.

And when I was there, I found that essentially there are news moves markets and there are a whole bunch of market triggers that essentially move stocks either up or down.

And it's important to pay attention to those triggers.

So what we did at Graphire is we created what we call our hot page, which essentially is a whole bunch of, there's more than a hundred data triggered alerts and market sensitive triggers.

So things like company reports and the like, and you can find out via this page which stocks are hot, essentially.

So information moves markets.

So there's a whole bunch of criteria that people trade off.

And you guys being professional investors, you'd be well aware of a lot of these.

company earnings, profit downgrades, announcements about key personnel changes, dividends.

I know investors love hearing about dividends and even externally geopolitical events can also impact your share price.

Finance obviously works on a 24-hour news cycle.

You'll often hear in the news reports, you know, the ASX followed the Wall Street lower or Wall Street higher, or Asian markets have opened higher following a positive open by the ASX.

or European markets going, well, after the Asian trading day, European stocks opened higher or lower.

So everything is sort of contained into that 24 hour news cycle.

And you need to pay attention to what's going on.

I always hear from a lot of investors, well, I have a buy and hold strategy.

I don't need to, I'm not trading, I'm investing.

But even as an investor, you really need to be

paying attention to the risk.

If there is something going on with your company, you want to know about it.

You want some sort of notification to say, hey, whoa, I need to stop and pay attention because something's happening to my significant investment and I either need to act.

And of course, stop losses do that to some extent, but also

getting that early warning signal is something that Grafa does for those investors.

Also being across the trends, the trend is your friend.

One of the biggest trends right now in the global markets is obviously back in, I think 2021, OpenAI launched ChatGBT.

And from then on, that sort of triggered a huge flow of events where you saw

chat, you saw Microsoft buying a stake in OpenAI.

You've seen OpenAI's technology integrated into Microsoft.

Microsoft briefly became the number one company in the world.

Then it was overtaken by Nvidia.

Nvidia, of course, creating the chips that power the AI.

And all of this spilled over onto the ASX.

And I'll get to more of that in a minute.

Accountability is really important as well.

So you need to be across what's going on so that

you can sense check whatever any of your advisors are telling you, because you never know where self interest lies.

And whether it's your broker or your mate down the pub, you know, you're potentially getting dud advice.

And it's really good to stay across what's actually going on in the broader market.

Opportunity is another really good reason to stay across the information.

So

Pilbara Minerals is a great example.

I think it was back in 2021, there were a whole bunch of government stimulus around the world for EVs and you saw the price of lithium go through the roof and you saw the price of Pilbara Minerals go through the roof and a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon.

But the problem is, is if you stayed

on Pilbara Minerals for too long and you weren't across the information or you didn't watch those warning signals, Pilbara Minerals over the last 12 months has been the most shorted stock on the ASX.

It's down more than 40% this year.

So if you weren't paying attention and you got old advice from someone, you might think Pilbara Minerals have made lots of money.

Not the case in 2024.

Great, in 2021, 22, 23, 23, 24, not so much.

So if we look at what happened on the ASX in 2023, following on from what I said earlier, is we've had a massive rush on tech stocks.

So the tech index closed the year or the financial year up about 30% compared to the ASX, which was around 7.8%.

Now, you would have been able to start getting some kind of inkling of what was going on back in November last year.

Back to the trend, you would have been starting to see Microsoft becoming the world's largest company, Microsoft announcing record profits from the open AI integration.

And it would stand to reason that tech would have a similar run on the ASX.

Being across those trends is really, really important.

One of the things that Graphr does as well is helps you drill down into individual stocks and benchmark everything against what's going on in the ASX.

So if we look at pretty much one of the best performing stocks on the ASX in the 2020,

23-24 financial year.

Funnily enough, it's actually in the industrial sector, not in the tech sector specifically, but it is a technology company, SKS Technologies.

It's had a 658% increase in the last 12 months.

And just on Monday, just gone, actually, just recently, it announced

a profit guidance of about $130 million.

So it's an AV company, you can find out more about it on Grafa.

But how would you know that this stock was about to go through the roof?

Well,

We have a, back to those market screeners, is we have a whole bunch of criteria.

A lot of them are data triggered, some of them are market sensitive data, market sensitive triggers.

And you can see here that SKS started pinging all of our data screeners straight away.

So one of them there that you can see is Dark Horse.

Dark Horse shows a company that's rising consistently over 20 days.

And look how many Dark Horses there are on that screen.

that would have been an indication that this stock was something's going on it warrants further investigation and you know when you think about the ASX there's two and a half thousand stocks on the ASX how on earth are you able to tell which is a good stock and we find Grafa is a really great place to start it really helps

It's telling you based on data what that stock is doing, not based on your advisor with a vested interest or your mate down the pub.

It's helping you really kind of filter through two and a half thousand stocks and start to sort of shift out, sift out the potential diamonds from the chaff.

But in addition to that, we're not just a stock screener, we've created an overall global markets platform.

Right now we have data from

the entire ASX.

We also have the US markets, so the NASDAQ and the NYSE.

We also have economic data from 58 countries.

We have 1,000 currency Forex stock pairs, and we also have information data about 10,000 cryptocurrencies if you're into that sort of thing.

And also ETFs, you would have just seen the ETFs on the page as well.

So a whole bunch of information drilled down into individual stocks and

It's like a really easy to use kind of version of the Bloomberg Terminal, which costs you about 20 grand a year, if anyone's ever had a subscription.

So thanks for listening to me today.

We'd love you to download Grafa, where this slide is, it's mostly free.

And that's true, most of it is actually free.

The only part of the app that is behind a paywall are our

our market screeners, but the news, the data, the information, all of that's free.

So, hold up your phone, or if you're watching this on the phone, take a screenshot, and we'd love you to download the app.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you, Heidi.

Do you have time for two questions?

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you.

So, Heidi, you're ex-Bloomberg.

What did you learn about how market fluctuation, which inspired you to create Graphire?

Well, basically, Bloomberg have a, and they have done for a really long time, they have a feature if you like on Bloomberg, which is called their speed desk.

And so one of their most used features, the speed at which they can summarise a announcement on any stock market, and then turn that into a easily consumable newsfeed.

And what I used to see all the time is even the ASX would post an announcement and it wouldn't be until it hit Bloomberg that it started, that stock started moving in any way, shape or form.

I think the power of information is just extraordinary.

And what we wanted to do was, but that information used to only be available to the very, very, very extreme wealthy.

And we wanted to make sure that that level of information was available to everyone at a really low cost.

I hate saying the word democratising information, but there's a reason the rich get richer.

They've got access to all of this information and we really wanted to make it accessible for everybody.

Grapha looks like it's for young people.

Is it aimed at young people?

And who are your users?

We get that a lot, actually.

A lot of people think that it's for young people.

But if we look at our data, most of our users are either at director level or senior management level.

And our age group is pretty much sort of 35 to 50.

The key with Grafa is it's personalized to the user.

So there is no other platform in the world that personalizes content for the user.

So if you care about five stocks, you put those stocks on your watch list and we curate all of the content in the world and serve that into your hub feed.

So you don't have to do any work, you just log onto the Grafa app every day and you can see all of the times

those particular companies have triggered one of our data alerts or you can see all of the news published about that company.

So it means back to that risk point that I was making is where your early warning system that something's gone wrong and you probably need to react or equally that there's an opportunity that you can jump on board with and

and make money.

My uncle bought Pilbara mineral shares right at the beginning in 2021 and went and bought a farm with the gains that he made.

So there are those opportunities out there and having this fantastic filtering system to be able to identify those is incredibly important as an investor.

Thanks, Heidi.

No worries.

Thank you, Angelina.

Thank you for having me.