Your global radar for ESG Controversies
Track controversial events that may impact the performance and reputation of 7 Million public and private companies.
Adverse media detection across 40,000 curated sources
Research shows that excluding high-controversy stocks and bonds boosts returns and reduces risk, but negative news is hard to detect at scale. RavenPack Controversy News help discretionary and quantitative investors inform their decisions with daily streamlined reports of controversial events.
Scores are powered by a transparent framework that processes news systematically for consistent information handling and predictability. They are delivered contextually, with clear categories defined in a proprietary taxonomy of 171 ESG controversy event categories including:
- Environmental impact
- Environmental Compliance
- Community
- workforce
- Business ethics
- Consumers & products
- Accidents
These scores can help quantitative and discretionary investors:
Enhance Equity and Fixed-Income Asset Selection
Leverage early warning of controversies to mitigate risk and construct more robust portfolios.
Boost existing signals and strategies
Research has identified benefits of including a controversy factor in sector rotation and other playbooks.
See it in action
Controversy news are delivered daily, and each week we publish the list of companies that have seen the largest change in score.
UNDER THE HOOD
Computing controversy News
Controversy news are the outcome of a multi-step process including:
Content Collection
RavenPack analyzes textual content from high-quality sources to identify events that match any of the targeted categories. Documents considered include English and non-English news in 13 languages, and social sources.
Information Extraction
Additional filters ensure the data remains focused on contemporary observations. The exact process is fully documented.
Signal Construction
Controversy factors are then produced for each detected company, 7 times per day, at midnight UTC and at the open & close in New York, Paris, and Tokyo. The score itself is on a positive, open-ended scale that quantifies the magnitude of a controversy along with its relevance in the media. It is influenced by the volume of news behind a controversy, the number of languages where it is picked up, the same for number of sources, its novelty, and whether the controversy is able to carry a headline. The signal also applies a decay to aging controversy reports.
Factor Composition
Controversy Factors are gathered in daily files that detail all the companies for which controversies have been detected on a given universe.
- Leverage early warning of controversies to mitigate risk
- Boost existing signals and strategies
- When the factor was produced.
- The company, as name and RavenPack entity identifier.
- Taxonomy Level — the level of the taxonomy used for classifying the controversy score. It could be at the level of individual categories, groups, pillars, or themes.
- Factor name — the name of the factor, which refers to the specific taxonomy value within the ESG taxonomy level.
- Factor score — the numerical score value representing the computed factor for the given entity.