Professor Tony Garcia of Seton Hall: Teaching Qualitative Research With Quartr Pro

Quartr's student program gives the next generation of finance professionals access to Quartr Pro as part of their education. Many leading universities in the U.S. and Europe have already integrated the platform into their curriculum.

One of these is Professor Anthony T. Garcia, MBA (who goes by Tony) at the Stillman School at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. This semester, over 300 students of his students are enrolled in the student program, and utilize Quartr Pro for their qualitative research.

Tony received his undergraduate degree in Economics from Princeton and his MBA in Finance from Harvard, before moving on to have a long career as an investment banker. During his time on Wall Street, he worked at major firms such as Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers. He later transitioned into managing businesses, including co-founding and successfully selling a tech startup, and acting as a corporate director of several publicly traded companies.

He has been at Seton Hall since 2015, and has taught a variety of courses including Mergers & Acquisitions, Money & Banking, and Financial Strategy, while also serving as an academic advisor.

We sat down with Tony for a brief chat regarding his experience with using the platform, his view on the importance of qualitative research, and the benefits students can draw from having access to Quartr Pro.

Hi Tony! Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us about your experience incorporating Quartr Pro as part of your teaching at Seton Hall University. We’re going to get right into it here: what role does qualitative research and company narratives play in your teaching?

In order for the students to understand the context in which to evaluate a company's financial performance, they have to understand the company's strategy, they have to understand what the market is saying about the company, as well as what the company is saying about itself. Qualitative research is a critical part because otherwise, the student is not going to be able to get to the proper end result – which is to make the numbers tell a proper story.

Would you say it's important for future finance professionals to recognize, early in their education, the value of conducting qualitative research and to begin engaging with it as soon as possible?

Absolutely. I've been doing this type of multi-comparison for about 47 years, starting with my first employment at Morgan Stanley in the mergers and acquisitions department, so I'm very familiar with what's needed to do this properly. Our goal at the Stillman School at Seton Hall University is to prepare our students so that they can hit the ground running in any financial services professional position. In order to do that, we try to give them the tools that will enable them to be successful.

Before incorporating Quartr Pro into your and your student's toolbox, how would you go about working with qualitative research?

Our process prior to Quartr Pro was limited to looking at a company's quarterly earnings conference call and focusing only on the transcript that was related to that call. What I find so interesting about Quartr's approach, and the topics feature especially, is that it takes into account other events that are equally important as the quarterly conference call.

For example, a company's presentations at an industry conference, or having an investor day that's not related to a quarterly event. For example, Texas Instruments has an event that is all about capital allocation.

Quartr sweeps up all these different occasions where companies are talking about themselves and incorporates that into the AI-model, enabling the topics feature to recognize that when a user is asking a question about a particular topic, they're not only interested in the quarterly conference call – they want all the different arenas in which the company might have been expressing a point of view.

So part of the appeal is collecting all of the different narrative points and making it more easily digestible?

Exactly. The other part is that in the world of finance, we're never looking at a company in isolation. It's always in comparison to some relevant peer group. And one of the really useful features of Quartr Pro is that the aforementioned topics feature recommends a peer group, but the user has the ability to be selective. If a name was added to the list of peers and the user decides that I'm not particularly interested in that name, it's easy to delete that company. Vice versa, you can add companies to your custom peer group very easily.

All of this allows a user to find questions that were being asked by an analyst who may not necessarily cover the company that you're interested in, but covers others that are relevant in that marketplace. So the user is able to recognize when good questions are being asked and useful information is being discussed with a peer that's relevant to the company that one is analyzing.

What were the primary challenges when working with qualitative research sourced in traditional ways?

First off, it requires the user to be mindful of all the different opportunities that a company takes to put information into the marketplace. The process of surveying information from all companies one covers is time-consuming. Quartr Pro eliminates the need for search. The platform does it for you.

Secondly, the old school method would be to read through transcripts and try to either take notes or hold in your mind a few of the key points and then read other relevant documents and trying to compare and contrast which was a challenge. It could be done but it was very time-consuming and required an intensive investment of time and energy on the part of the analyst. Quartr Pro simplifies this by presenting the information in a digestible format.

The platform is a great example of the application of the advances in technology to information that has been needed for many, many decades. The information is being presented in a way that makes it more likely to be useful to an analyst who's trying to stay at the cutting edge of being informed about a particular company and its stock.

How do you think that your students will benefit from having used Quartr Pro to highlight the value of qualitative research as they move on to their professional careers?

The traditional financial analysis approach is very quantitative and we try to send the message that the numbers have to be put in perspective, and it's the qualitative information that provides that perspective. We hope that by making the students familiar with that from their time at university when they move on to their professional career they'll carry that message.

The numbers are, of course, a very important component and Quartr Pro does have the ability to provide some quantitative information as well. But having the context that the qualitative information provides is not what I'll call icing on the cake – it's part of the cake. It's the necessary component in order for the financial analysis to have any validity.

Very well put. Do you see any benefits for your students being proficient in Quartr Pro as they move into their professional careers?

Today, there is no shortage of very talented, well-educated candidates for the investment banks and asset management firms to interview. So, it's important to be able to have a point of differentiation. If you can be that student who has all the right characteristics and you also show a familiarity with the latest tools that could be brought to bear to make for better analysis, you're going to stand out in a very positive way.

In this case, what I find very interesting is the opportunity to expose the students to this tool, and have the students possibly be the ones who are bringing it to the attention of their new company. The folks that they're going to work with might not have been previously exposed to this type of platform, and upon seeing the usefulness of this particular tool might want to incorporate it into their own workflows.

What has the experience been like working with the Quartr team and setting up the accounts for your students?

The process of getting students on to Quartr is very smooth. Whether it was the students signing up individually or even better with the professor coordinating with the customer service team at Quartr in order to do bulk registration.

The students are able to quickly access Quartr Pro, which is the professional version of their platform, very easily. The student can very quickly turn their attention to the real purpose of the lesson which is to get deeply involved in the platform in the same way they would if they were doing this at a professional services firm.

Would you recommend other professors and faculties to incorporate Quartr Pro?

I definitely recommend that other professors consider adopting Quartr Pro as part of their curriculum. I have already convinced others within my own university to adopt the platform and their experience has been very successful. I think my colleagues recognize the relevance of the tool to the education that all professors are trying to provide to university-level students.

It's a universal need for students to be exposed to a tool like this, in the same way, that there was a great leap forward decades ago when the first databases became available. Instead of analysts having to extract SEC filings and pull information and organize it into a spreadsheet, suddenly there were databases that gave you the ability to specify a few search terms and you'd get a first cut of an analysis that you would then refine.

We're now at the point where platforms like Quartr Pro can accomplish a very important part of the evaluation process. I think all professors would want their students to gain some firsthand experience in using the platform in that way.

Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us about your experience, and for being such a proponent of Quartr Pro.

Thank you, it was my pleasure.

If you want to learn more about our student program, visit Quartr.com/students.