For both public and private firms, comparable companies' analysis is widely used as a method for company valuation. In particular, the method is of great value for valuation of private equity companies. The several approaches to the comparable companies' method usually rely on a qualitative approach to identifying similar peer companies, which tend to use established industry classification schemes and/or analyst intuition and knowledge. However, more quantitative methods have started being used in the literature and in the private equity industry, in particular, machine learning clustering, and natural language processing (NLP). For NLP methods, the process consists of extracting product entities from e.g., the company's website or company descriptions from some financial database system and then to perform similarity analysis. Here, using companies' descriptions/summaries from publicly available companies' Wikipedia websites, we show that using large language models (LLMs), such as GPT from OpenAI, has a much higher precision and success rate than using the standard named entity recognition (NER) methods which use manual annotation. We demonstrate quantitatively a higher precision rate, and show that, qualitatively, it can be used to create appropriate comparable companies peer groups which could then be used for equity valuation.

Fractal has raised $360 million from TPG in a new financing round and entered the unicorn club as the Mumbai and San Francisco-headquartered AI startup, which counts Google and Wells Fargo among its customers, scales its offerings and begins preparation for an IPO. The new financing round valued the 21-year-old startup "at well north of $1 billion," said Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder and group chief executive at Fractal, in an interview with TechCrunch. TPG invested in the startup through its TPG Capital Asia, its Asia-focused private equity platform. The new round, which brings the startup's all-time raise to about $685 million, involves some secondary share purchase as well. Fractal Analytics provides artificial intelligence and analytics solutions to scores of Fortune 100 firms.

CBS MarketWatch declared 2020: The Year of the SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation). A record 219 companies went public through this fundraising vehicle that uses a reverse merger with an existing private business to create a publicly-listed entity. This accounted for more than $73 billion dollars of investment, providing private equity startups a new outlet to raise capital and provide shareholder liquidity. According to Goldman Sachs, the current trends represents a "year-over-year jump of 462% and outpacing traditional IPOs by $6 billion." In response to the interest in SPACs, the Securities and Exchange Commission agreed last week to allow private companies to raise capital through direct listings, providing even more access to the public markets outside of Wall Street's traditional institutional gatekeepers.

SoftBank Group Corp.'s founder Masayoshi Son said he has $80 billion in cash to buy back more shares and continue investing in both private and public companies. "If our shares drop down, I will buy back more shares more aggressively," the chief executive officer said at the New York Times DealBook conference Tuesday. "We have $80 billion in cash at hand." After a record fall in its share price in March, SoftBank unveiled plans to offload ¥4.5 trillion ($43.2 billion) in assets and buy back ¥2.5 trillion of its own stock. The idea of going private through a buyout has been discussed within SoftBank for at least five years, but Son declined to comment on whether he would take his company off the stock market.

NEW YORK - Uber is set for its Wall Street debut Friday, with a massive share offering that is a milestone for the ride-hailing industry and the so-called sharing economy but which comes with simmering concerns about its business model. Shares will be priced at $45 for the initial public offering, valuing the startup at more than $82 billion, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. San Francisco-based Uber was set to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the eponymous ticker "UBER" in one of the technology sector's largest IPOs. Despite the eye-popping valuation, Uber dialed back some of its earlier ambitions for a value exceeding $100 billion after the rocky start seen by U.S. ride-share rival Lyft Inc. Analyst Daniel Ives of Wedbush Securities said Uber has the potential to be a game-changing company and "is paving a similar road to what Amazon did to transform retail/ecommerce and Facebook did for social media." Uber has the potential to grow, Ives said, as it morphs its ride-sharing platform into a more diverse set of services, with Uber Eats, Uber Freight and self-driving vehicle initiatives.

LOS ANGELES - Lyft said Tuesday its loss in the past quarter widened to $1.1 billion in the ride-hailing giant's first financial report as a public company, as it announced it was teaming up with former Google car unit Waymo on autonomous taxis. Revenue for California-based Lyft nearly doubled from a year earlier to $776 million and the number of active riders grew to over 20.5 million. Lyft said its losses deepened as a result of $894 million in costs that included stock-based compensation and related tax expenses in connection with its initial public offering in late March. The deficit compared with a loss of $234.3 million in the same period of 2018. "The first quarter was a strong start to an important year, our first as a public company," said Logan Green, Lyft's co-founder and chief executive.

With the growth in sustainable investing, there's been a surge in data on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors over the past few years. Demand for ESG data is rising as asset managers look to incorporate ESG factors such as low-carbon emissions or gender diversity on boards into their investment analysis and decision-making processes. Fund managers, including BlackRock and Vanguard, are offering sustainable funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) based on sustainable indexes to capture assets from millennials and women. But the uptake has moved beyond specialty funds and has spread to pension funds, particularly in Europe, looking for long-term returns, reported Bloomberg Intelligence in April. "The financial cost of environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance and better disclosure is spurring uptake," wrote Bloomberg Intelligence in "Sustainable Investing Grows on Pensions, Millennials."

Investment managers are increasingly looking to use technology to generate new trading ideas. Hedge funds in the U.S. and Europe now spend more than $170 million annually on so-called alternative data, according to a survey by Greenwich Associates. Though small, this deal announced Friday is the latest in a string of consolidation among new financial data providers. Advanced Publications Inc. acquired 1010data, an alternative data provider, for $500 million in 2015. Kensho Technologies, which applies artificial intelligence to stock research, announced this year that it would be bought by S&P Global Inc. for $550 million.

Amazon is often compared to Silicon Valley tech giants like Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, but a vast logistical apparatus separates it from its tech peers. They unload trucks, drive forklifts and walk miles collecting products to fill orders--all for around the same pay as workers in other companies' warehouses. One researcher likened Amazon to the child produced by a three-way merger between Google, United Parcel Service Inc. and Walmart Inc. "At Amazon, you've got this whole group of foot soldiers out there that are working on fulfillment centers that aren't part of the picture for the other names in internet land," said Michael Olson, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. "It shows how Amazon is different from the other tech stocks." More than 330 large public companies have disclosed median annual pay figures for the first time this year, a requirement of the post-financial crisis Dodd-Frank law.

I finally beat the S&P 500 by 10%. This might not sound like much but when we're dealing with large amounts of capital and with good liquidity, the profits are pretty sweet for a hedge fund. More aggressive approaches have resulted in much higher returns. It all started after I read a paper by Gur Huberman titled "Contagious Speculation and a Cure for Cancer: A Non-Event that Made Stock Prices Soar," (with Tomer Regev, Journal of Finance, February 2001, Vol. "A Sunday New York Times article on a potential development of new cancer-curing drugs caused EntreMed's stock price to rise from 12.063 at the Friday close, to open at 85 and close near 52 on Monday. It closed above 30 in the three following weeks. The enthusiasm spilled over to other biotechnology stocks. The potential breakthrough in cancer research already had been reported, however, in the journal Nature, and in various popular newspapers including the Times! Thus, enthusiastic public attention induced a permanent rise in share prices, even though no genuinely new information had been presented."