Essentia Insight is an award-winning behavioral analytics service for professional investors.

Essentia Insight combines sophisticated data analytics and specialist behavioral consulting. 75% of managers who have used Insight for 12+ months have increased their alpha generation by 180 bps per year, on averagewithout taking on additional risk.

Essentia works with portfolio managers to continuously improve their performance by helping them play to their strengths, avoid their weaknesses and make fewer unconscious errors.

Essentia Insight can help unlock the behavioral alpha the excess return that results from mitigating one’s biases — hidden in your decision-making process.

Download Insight factsheet

The Behavioral Alpha Frontier - Decision Attribution Software

See how one asset manager used Essentia’s behavioral analytics to reduce bias and increase performance. View case study

Measurably Better Investment Decisions

Essentia Analytics - Decision Analytics Software

Essentia Insight runs your historical trade and behavioral data through our industry-leading analytics engine. Our proprietary algorithms use machine learning to detect behavioral patterns — the good ones that contribute to alpha, and the poor ones that destroy it.

Review the analysis regularly with your dedicated Essentia Insight Partner. Our Insight Partners are ex-fund managers who can help you distill the data to reveal the behavioral patterns that have the most impact on your performance.

Use these insights to formulate actions and process enhancements going forward. A key aspect of this feedback loop is customizable nudges that notify you automatically — ex-ante — when a decision-point is approaching or a detrimental behavioral pattern may be emerging.

Insight’s actionable data and proactive nudges help you do more of what you’re good at — and less of what you’re not.

Essentia analysis of portfolio manager behavioral patterns

At a time when information is being commoditized and competition from passive investment strategies is increasing, Essentia’s analysis of portfolio manager behavioral patterns reveals new opportunities for capturing alpha that is often lost to behavioral biases and decision-making deficiencies.

Read our research into the lifecycle of alpha

Your Essentia Insight Partner will meet with you on a regular basis and provide a tailored and confidential review of your portfolio activity as analyzed by Essentia’s analytics engine. This data-driven review cycle is an invaluable tool to enable continuous improvement in your decision-making process. All our Insight Partners are former portfolio managers who understand your investment strategy and can cut to the results that matter most to you.

Essentia Insight Partners
Essentia's behavioral nudges

Essentia Insight’s Nudges are a scientifically proven way to reinforce improvement in investment decision-making habits. They integrate seamlessly into your daily workflow and enable you to put Essentia’s insights to work quickly.

Learn more about Essentia Nudges

“Essentia’s data-driven feedback loop pulls out what’s working and what’s not … and helps drive meaningful conversations to maximize results for our clients.”

Amy Oldenburg – MD, Morgan Stanley Investment Management

Who will benefit from using Essentia Insight?

Portfolio Managers and Analysts:

  • Continuously improve your investment decision-making with a data-driven feedback loop
  • Understand your unique behavioral footprint and mitigate bias
  • Articulate your investment process and objectively demonstrate your skill to end investors, regardless of recent performance

CIOs and Investment Oversight Teams:

  • Add a behavioral lens to your performance analysis process
  • Detect changes in manager behavior before they have a lasting impact on the portfolio
  • Arm yourself with better information about where each member of your investment team adds value and how you can unlock more

Asset Allocators/Multi-Manager Platforms:

  • Understand how — not just where — each manager is generating alpha
  • Incorporate a quantifiable behavioral risk consideration to your manager selection and review processes
  • Give platform portfolio managers access to the industry’s leading behavioral analytics and reporting service
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Case Study: Global Equity Fund

Illustrates how Essentia’s behavioral reporting and intelligent nudges enabled one portfolio manager to mitigate bias and unlock 68 bps of behavioral alpha per year.

Download Case Study

Essentia Insight FAQ

Question not answered here? Contact us at [email protected].

Essentia Insight is used by active equity portfolio managers — long-only and long-short — worldwide. Our total assets under analysis are in excess of $250 billion. Our clients are typically funds in excess of $1 billion in assets under management, and comprise a wide range of trading frequencies and degrees of concentration.

The Insight service is variably priced based on the number and type of portfolios we cover and the service offerings employed. (See Insight Enterprise for more on our discounted pricing for engagements of five or more portfolios.) Given that 75% of managers who have used Insight for 12+ months have increased their alpha generation by an average of 170 bps per year, the ROI on the Insight investment is often massive.

Insight currently handles equity and equity-like instruments (ETFs, CFDs with an equity underlying). We’re in the process of adding analysis of other instruments — if you’re interested in helping us prioritize which come first, let us know.

You supply the historical and daily trade and holdings data via CSV file. For a high likelihood of statistical significance, we look for at least 2,000 trades, including adds and trims, as a starting point. We supply the price and reference data, courtesy of FactSet. Essentia has a tried-and-tested process for making the data upload process simple to establish and automate, and our dedicated Data Onboarding Team is there to help every step of the way.

We provide a simple template and work closely with your team to onboard your data. But we also have ready-built interfaces with a growing number of leading OMS, PMS and IBOR providers, streamlining the data onboarding and maintenance process and minimizing (or eliminating) the effort required from the investment manager’s data team.

No. Our clients are typically investors, rather than traders — many with very long-term horizons. We work with portfolios with any concentration level and turnover frequency. Because our analytics are flexible, they can be calibrated to reflect the uniqueness of your investment strategy and the time frame you are using to measure success.

Nudges are entirely optional, but they have succeeded in helping our clients form better habits where journals, spreadsheets and research management systems have failed.

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