When Tom Beevers was working as a fund manager at London-based Newton Investment Management in 2012, he started to notice a growing amount of equity research appearing online. In some cases, he says, the views on stocks from independent analysts on popular websites such as Seeking Alpha were “even better than the research I was receiving from the banks”.

There was one problem, however: the really good stuff was hard to find, hidden among the vast amount of online noise.