Building Consensus Models for Hedge Fund Clients at Visible Alpha

Dhruv joined Visible Alpha as a Junior Research Associate in 2022, embedded in the industrials team covering heavy industries, electrical equipment, and electronics companies.

His core responsibility was maintaining live consensus models for hedge fund clients. When a company in the portfolio released earnings or held an analyst call, buy-side clients needed updated models quickly to inform their decisions. Dhruv tracked the earnings calendar for roughly 140 companies, flagging priority clients and ensuring their models were updated first.

The model-building process required synthesizing views from five to eight sell-side broker reports per company. Dhruv read each report, identified the prevailing analyst consensus, and applied structured guidelines to decide which assumptions to carry forward. When more than half the sell-side analysts aligned on a range, that view anchored the model. Where views diverged, he exercised judgment within the firm's framework to arrive at a defensible number.

Each completed model went through two rounds of review before reaching the client. Dhruv iterated on reviewer feedback, refining both the numbers and the structure of the output. Over the course of the year, he processed roughly two and a half thousand live model updates across the industrial portfolio.