Fintel.io, a provider of advanced financial research tools for investors, reports on macro fund flows into country-tracking ETFs and equities – data says “Outlook for UK markets are slightly negative says key metrics in UK Tracking ETF. TechBullion spoke to Fintel founder, Wilton Risenhoover, on this topic. Please find out more in this interview.
Please tell us about yourself?
My name is Wilton Risenhoover. I am a career Software Engineer, having spent all my career coding for hire. I’ve been a CTO of a few venture-backed startups, and have launched a few ventures of my own. In 2010 I finished my MBA at UCLA Anderson and switched my focus solely on financial products for consumers. I worked for a real-estate crowdfunding company, then a student loan product, and then ultimately started working on Fintel. I’ve been working on Fintel for the last six years.
Tell us more about the business, what is Fintel?
Fintel is an equity research platform for small investors, and by small investors, I mean individual investors, traders, and small funds. As an individual investor myself, as well as the manager of a small fund, I want to create an institutional-quality data platform that is affordable and accessible.
To do this successfully, we’ve built tools that help with the complete life-cycle of investing – from idea generation, discovery, due diligence, and now – with our new broker integration – portfolio monitoring.
The data we provide is extremely broad and will help with almost any investing or trading strategy – our options flow data that provides real-time large block options trades – for example – can be used to supplement short-term active trading strategies.
Alternatively, our Capital IQ data and SEC filing database – combined with our extraordinary stock screener – provides deep accounting data that is more suitable for long term investors and asset managers.
What unique services and solutions do you provide at Fintel, could you give us a walkthrough of the platform?
The foundations of the research platform is the data – and we have one of the broadest selections of data available in any consumer platform. Our partnership with Capital IQ allows us to publish accounting data on almost every publicly-traded company in the world. Besides global accounting data, we also have fund ownership, insider trading and sentiment, options sentiment, and of course short interest.
All of this data is available in our unique stock screener, which allows users to create complex queries using our Financial Query Language (FQL). For example:
country in (US, CA, GB, AU, JP, HK); exchange != OTC; /* * Eliminate all stocks not in top 25% of two value metrics. */ rankPercentile(EBitToEv) > 75; rankPercentile(BookToMarket) > 75; /* * my Value score is the average of the percentile ranks of my two * favorite valuation measures */ let myValueFactor = (rankPercentile(BookToMarket) + rankPercentile(EBitToEv)) / 2; myValueFactor > 75;
This type of query is simply not available on any financial site – consumer or otherwise – as far as I know.
Recent data on the UK markets shows a slightly negative market for funds, could you highlight some of the key metrics in UK ETF?
One of the things that is interesting about the financial markets is that every country has an ETF that holds positions in the country’s leading companies, and by watching the ETF we can learn what the financial markets predict for the future of the country.
In the case of the UK, the sentiment is slightly negative.
- Short Interest decreased about 15% from it’s recent highs of 4.2M shares at the end of November to 3.57M shares this month, indicating a slightly improving outlook. However, this is significantly higher than the 1.5M shares reported one year prior, which suggests an ongoing negative outlook.
- The total number of funds disclosing positions dropped 5.68% to 248 funds in the last three months, indicating a slightly negative outlook.
- Average portfolio allocation by funds declined 7% in the most recent quarter
- The options put/call ratio is 1.14, indicating a slightly negative outlook
What are the most significant changes in fund flows into the UK’s largest companies?
- RDSB / Royal Dutch Shell PLC total owners declined slightly by 0.07% to 1,517 disclosed funds, while average allocation increased 10.27%. The OAS for RDSB is 70, indicating a higher than average accumulation by funds.
- BHP / BHP Group total owners declined slightly to 1,119 and average allocation declined 14.93. The OAS is 15.41, indicating a significant decline in interest by funds.
- HSBC Holdings average allocation declined 2.57% and the Ownership Allocation Score is 41.37 out of 100, also indicating a decline in institutional interest.
- Glencore PLC average allocation increased 9.26% and the Ownership Allocation Score is 83.35 out of 100, also indicating an increase in institutional interest.
- CCL / Carnival PLC total disclosed owners declined 10.82%, average allocation declined 28% and OAS is 8.21, indicating significant divestment by funds.
In addition to the funds flow leaderboard, what other benefits do data-driven retail investors get from Fintel?
We provide a variety of data that assists with almost any investing strategy. For example, we provide a Dividend Leaderboard for the world and individual countries – including the UK – that show the best investments for Dividend Investors at any given time. This leaderboard examines a number of key factors, including dividend yield, dividend growth, and the cash payout ratio.
Tell us also about Finpedia, developed by Fintel.io, what is the importance and how does it work?
An important part of equity research is learning about companies. This usually means going to a lot of different places to find and digest background and historical information. Finpedia is a financial wiki where users can share their company research. It’s free for everybody.
What are you currently working on at Fintel and what should we expect from your roadmap this 2022 and beyond?
We just launched a new feature that allows users to connect their broker accounts. This allows us to provide a data-rich dashboard that updates automatically when users make trades in any of their accounts. It’s a big time-saver. This will also allow us to generate performance metrics for users that span all of their accounts, as well as generate interesting comparative metrics.
