The Four AI Agents Behind Every Valpe Analysis

The Investment Analyst is the core of the Valpe research engine. Its job is to evaluate a company the same way a professional equity analyst at a major investment bank would — rigorously, systematically, and without emotional bias. It reads the raw fundamental data for a given stock and produces a structured assessment of the company's financial health, competitive position, and valuation.

This agent examines revenue growth trajectories, profit margins, earnings quality, and balance sheet strength. It also evaluates valuation metrics like the Price-to-Earnings ratio (P/E), the Price-to-Earnings-to-Growth ratio (PEG), and free cash flow generation to determine whether the current stock price is justified by the company's actual business performance. A company with spectacular growth but a dangerously stretched valuation will score differently than a steady compounder trading at a reasonable multiple.

Critically, the Investment Analyst also receives the structured output of the News Analyst agent — not raw news, but a pre-classified summary of recent events and their materiality. This prevents the same news story from being double-counted across agents, ensuring each agent contributes a genuinely independent perspective to the final score.

The agent outputs a score from 0 to 100 representing the fundamental investment case strength, along with a list of reasons supporting or undermining the investment thesis.

The Risk Manager does something that no standard investment research tool does: it evaluates a potential investment not in isolation, but in the context of your existing portfolio. A stock that looks excellent on its own merits may be a terrible addition if you already have heavy exposure to the same sector, the same market cap range, or highly correlated assets.

This agent is built around the principle that concentration risk is one of the most overlooked dangers in individual investor portfolios. When a single stock represents more than 10–15% of a portfolio, a bad quarter can do serious damage — even if the underlying business is fundamentally strong. The Risk Manager explicitly models this scenario, identifying when a new position would push a portfolio's concentration beyond acceptable thresholds.

Beyond concentration, the agent evaluates sector overexposure (for example, holding NVIDIA, AMD, and Qualcomm simultaneously means a semiconductor sector downturn hits your whole portfolio at once), and correlation risk — the degree to which your holdings tend to move together in volatile markets, reducing the real diversification benefit of holding multiple stocks.

As the platform evolves to support real user accounts, the Risk Manager will read your actual connected portfolio rather than a reference portfolio — making its assessments precisely personalized to your specific financial situation.

Individual stocks do not exist in a vacuum. Even the most fundamentally strong company can underperform for extended periods if the broader macroeconomic environment is working against its sector. The Macro Economist agent exists to answer a specific question: given what's happening in the economy right now, is this a good time to be adding exposure to this particular type of business?

This agent reads live economic data directly from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) system — the same data source used by professional economists and institutional investment managers. It monitors the Federal Funds Rate (the benchmark interest rate controlled by the Federal Reserve), Core PCE inflation (the Fed's preferred inflation measure), GDP growth, and unemployment rates to build a real-time picture of the economic cycle.

The relationship between macroeconomic conditions and stock sectors is well-established and important. Rising interest rates tend to compress valuations for high-growth technology companies, because the higher "discount rate" reduces the present value of future earnings. Conversely, financial companies often benefit from higher rates through improved net interest margins. Defensive sectors like consumer staples and healthcare tend to outperform during economic contractions, while cyclical sectors like industrials and materials lead during expansions.

The Macro Economist maps these relationships automatically — it knows which sectors are rate-sensitive, growth-sensitive, or defensive, and adjusts its assessment accordingly based on live data from FRED.

Markets move on information — and not all information is created equal. A single analyst downgrade from a major firm can be more significant than ten positive news stories from smaller outlets. An earnings beat of 2 cents per share is far less material than a surprise CEO resignation. The News Analyst agent exists specifically to make these distinctions — to classify recent news events by type and materiality, separating genuine signal from background noise.

This agent runs first in the Valpe pipeline, before any other agent begins its analysis. The reason for this sequencing is deliberate: it ensures that the Investment Analyst and other agents receive a clean, pre-classified summary of recent events — not raw, unprocessed news — which prevents the same story from being counted twice or interpreted inconsistently across agents.

For each news item, the News Analyst determines: what type of event this is (earnings report, analyst rating change, regulatory action, merger announcement, product launch, leadership change, legal action, or other), how material the event is to the company's fundamentals or stock price (High, Medium, or Low), whether the coverage represents genuinely new information or multiple outlets re-reporting the same underlying story, and what the overall news sentiment is across all recent coverage (Bullish, Bearish, Neutral, or Mixed).

The agent also notes the freshness of the news — whether coverage is current, dated, or sparse — so users understand whether they're seeing a complete picture of recent developments or an incomplete one constrained by data availability.