Case Study: HSBC Global Markets achieves data-driven high-growth stock selection with IBM Watson AI

HSBC is using AI to identify potential high-growth stocks

HSBC Global Markets needed a better way to turn massive amounts of structured and unstructured data into actionable investment insight, especially as traditional analysis could not keep up with the volume of news, social posts, and other text-based signals. Working with IBM and its partner EquBot, HSBC set out to use AI to identify high-growth stocks and build a risk-controlled equity index for investors.

IBM helped power the solution with Watson Discovery, Watson Natural Language Understanding, and Watson Studio, enabling the HSBC AI Powered US Equity Index (AiPEX) to analyze about one million news articles a day and 20 years of historical data. The result was a stock-picking model that has driven more than USD 2 billion in sales, generated over USD 250 million in its first few months, and outperformed the S&P 500 by 123% over 10 years.

HSBC Global Markets

Holly Robertson

Vice President, Quantitative Investment Solutions Sales