Reply To: How do I use Watson’s Daily to illustrate my interest in sectors in a firm?

[Peter Watson]

Hi there Apolloniya! I’m just getting back into the swing of things in the forum, so please forgive my absence! I think that a good way of doing research is trying to look at areas on a sector basis (no company exists in a vacuum). One way of doing this is to find an index (e.g. the FTSE100) and then looking at the companies in the real estate sector, for example. Once you’ve got the company names, you could use the search function on Watson’s Daily to look up individual companies and make your own notes on there (you can also do this on the website). You then need to take a step back and look at what is driving the companies across the sector at the current time, what challenges they may be facing and then look at how this is affecting the particular companies you are following. It may be that they are prospering while others are failing – so you need to ask yourself why that is, what’s different about them etc. It may also help for you to then think about how the company you are applying for can get business out of it. Although this sounds like a bit of a mercenary way of looking at things, it’s this commercial awareness that firms are looking for – in other words, how can the firm I am applying to make money out of this situation??