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 Scores 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:

See it in action

Controversy scores are delivered daily, and each week we publish the list of companies that have seen the largest change in score.

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UNDER THE HOOD

Computing controversy Scores

Controversy scores 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 scores are then produced for each detected company. 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.

Indicator Composition

Controversy Scores are gathered in daily files that detail all the companies for which controversies have been detected on a given universe.

Controversy Score Facts
Purpose
  • Assess the US economy today
  • Predict future economic outlook
  • Boost strategies driven by business cycles
FrequencyDaily
FormatCSV
HistorySince 2002
UniverseEquities, Bonds
Content
  • Date of the controversy report
  • RavenPack Entity of the company, easily mappable to most security indicators with the RavenPack Knowledge Graph
  • Indicator code, describing the nature of the controversy, for instance “Legal Issues Defendant”, “Anti-Competitive Practices”, or “Layoffs”. “Controversy Score” shows the highest score across all controversies for the company.
  • Numeric score as provided by the framework, for a specific controversy, or for aggregated scores.
  • Level at which the controversy is detected in the taxonomy, such as “Pillar”, “theme”, “Group” or “Category”.
  • The reference month and year, for easier filtering.
Delivery RavenPack, Snowflake

Access Controversy Scores


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