Ramana Venkata joins the Board

I am excited to announce a new member of our board. Ramana Venkata is SVP and GM at Iron Mountain Digital. He took up this position after Stratify Inc., the company he founded and ran as CEO was acquired by Iron Mountain in late 2007.

Stratify’s vision of “making Unstructured Data actionable” could very well have been written for us. Stratify uses its text analytics technology to provide industry leading EDD services to the legal profession. Gridstone’s goal is to make company research powerful, easy and affordable by harnessing similar technologies. Ramana understands the disruptive power of such technologies at a level that very few do.

As an entrepreneur, Ramana built a scalable, successful business after safely navigating the dotcom bust. His advice and counsel are going to greatly benefit Gridstone.

It’s great to have Ramana in our corner.

Gridstone enters Private Beta!

Today, Gridstone, in its new avatar, goes into Private Beta. The company research platform with the deepest data is getting ready to spread its wings. We are looking for a limited number of interested users during the Private Beta phase. If you are interested, please contact us through the Sign Up form on the website.

If you research US listed companies and tend to go deeper than the average person, you will find our platform useful. And we will find your feedback useful.

We are three months away from our first milestone of covering the 2500 largest US listed companies at a depth that has never been done before. At the time of writing we are at 1750 going strong. Plus we have over 5000 companies that can be searched for text and data. So unless you’re really unlucky, or are interested only in microcaps, you’ll be able to use it for real work.

And did I mention, its free during the Beta period (another good reason to give it a spin).

Is Gridstone Right for You?

Anyone who researches US listed companies can benefit from using Gridstone. If you like to go deeper than the three standardized financial statements Gridstone has much to offer. Time series data on breakouts, guidance, operational data. Search for text or footnote data. All in one easy to use browser based application.

Here are a few handy tips to assess if Gridstone is right for you:

1. If you are on the buy-side, sell-side or fixed income and believe in deep fundamental company research.
2. If you are a management consultant and like to stay on top of things for the clients and the industry you serve.
3. If you work for a company and keep tabs on competitors or acquisition candidates.
4. If you are a corporate lawyer, an accountant or for any other reason need to go deeper than the three standardized financial statements.

Q & A with Matt Pham, TMG Energy

We sat down with Matt Pham, Energy Analyst at The Mitchell Group to learn more about how he was using Gridstone.

Tell us about your firm and the role you are in

I work as an energy analyst for The Mitchell Group, a long-only energy focused investment group with roughly $750mm AUM. Our investment style can be best described as Value, supported by fundamental, bottom-up analysis. Our investment time horizons are in the 3 to 5 year range and so we have a very low turnover. We tend to invest in theses supported by valuations and fundamentals.

Describe your own research process

My coverage universe includes various sub-segments within the energy sector: alternatives, coal, refineries, oil and gas, equipment providers, service providers, offshore drillers, land drillers, and exploration and production. Just within the oil and gas exploration and production sub-sector, I follow about 50 companies and maintain models on about 25. I will use models to screen for value and the team will discuss those ideas and conduct meetings with company management as part of our due diligence.

How does Gridstone help you in your research?

One of the biggest time sinks in the modeling process is the manual data entry and verification. For sector focused, small investment groups like TMG, analyst time is a precious commodity and as such, tools like Gridstone become invaluable. With Gridstone, data from SEC filings and transcripts can be mapped and linked to my models. The data entry process becomes automated, thus freeing up time for analysis.