"I like these 2-3 page summaries. Otherwise there's no time to read all the reports in detail."

Kenny Chung, Founder & CIO, Orchid Tree Investment Management

About Orchid Tree Investment Management

Orchid Tree Investment Management is a Hong Kong-based investment manager focused on corporate credit across investment-grade and high-yield bonds, convertibles, distressed and special situations.

Founder and CIO Kenny Chung runs the strategy with a focused team. That means the investment process has to cover a broad research surface without losing the speed required to act on it.

A convertible position may depend on whether the underlying equity can actually be borrowed that morning. A bond may dislocate against its sector or currency peers. A distressed issuer can move on an overnight filing, rating action or restructuring announcement.

For Orchid Tree, the challenge is not simply finding more information. It is turning a large and fragmented set of information into an investment view while the decision still matters.

Challenge | Institutional-Depth Research, Without an Institutional-Sized Team

Credit investing creates a particularly demanding research problem. Relevant information is spread across company filings, investor relations pages, rating-agency reports, market data, news, deal documents and, for convertible strategies, securities-lending data.

On any given day, Orchid Tree may need to check stock-borrow availability behind its convertible positions, compare a bank’s USD and EUR curves, assess an overnight filing from a distressed issuer, and catch a material update buried on a company’s IR page.

The information is there. But it sits across different sources, formats and analytical workflows, all competing for the same limited research time.

For a focused investment team, the constraint is not access to information. It is the ability to turn that information into a decision before the market moves.

That is especially apparent in convertibles. A general-purpose AI tool can summarize a filing or research an issuer. It cannot tell the desk whether the underlying equity is borrowable that morning, what that borrow costs, or how the bond screens against comparable opportunities.

Orchid Tree needed something closer to the way an analyst actually works: bring together the relevant data, determine what changed and what matters, and surface the securities that warrant attention — in a two-to-three-page read that can be acted on the same day.

Solution | Credit Workflows That Speak Bond

Orchid Tree's workspace was built around the desk's actual workflows rather than adapted from an equities template.

That distinction matters. Credit has its own inputs, analytical frameworks and decision points: stock borrow for convertibles, curve and cross-currency relative value, rating actions and liability-management events, and security-level analysis of how each development affects the book.

The borrow check that starts the day

For a convertible-arbitrage position, the trade only exists if the underlying equity can be shorted.

So the day begins with securities lending. Before moving into the rest of the morning research process, Orchid Tree checks borrow availability and cost on the equities underlying its convertible positions directly on LinqAlpha.

It is the first workflow Kenny runs each morning, and one he singles out as unavailable on other AI platforms. News and filings can explain the issuer. The borrow determines whether the trade can actually be put on.

Sector relative value, pulled and ranked

The desk’s flagship analytical workflow is sector relative value: pulling many bonds into a single comparable, ranked view rather than researching them one by one.

One command can scan a sector’s benchmark bonds, hedge USD and EUR paper into a comparable spread, fit issuer curves and rank the resulting dislocations.

In one analysis of global systemically important banks, the workflow screened 126 bonds across 13 issuers. It identified a 56–96bp pickup in EUR paper hedged back to USD and surfaced 10 executable pairs worth +33 to +71bp net of round-trip cost.

The same framework can be applied across sectors and currency pairs. Paired with a Briefing Agent, it can also rerun overnight, putting the latest dislocations in front of the desk before the open.

Following the company from the source

For issuer monitoring, Orchid Tree has LinqAlpha scan company IR pages alongside multiple news providers.

A change in guidance, capital action or management development can therefore be picked up directly from the underlying source and turned into the two-to-three-page read Kenny prefers — concise enough to get through that day, but detailed enough to inform a position.

The objective is not to reproduce everything that happened. It is to identify what changed, why it matters, and what deserves the desk’s attention.

Corporate & distressed catalysts, caught overnight

That becomes even more important across corporate and distressed positions.

LinqAlpha monitors the events that can move bonds — filings, rating actions, restructurings and liability-management developments — and connects them back to the securities they affect.

Rather than stopping at “the story is improving,” the workflow is designed to answer the next question: which bonds, and where do they screen?

The same research framework extends to sovereign and macro events when they matter to the book.

Within hours of the IMF board approving Egypt’s program review, unlocking roughly US$1.8 billion, LinqAlpha produced a full Egypt USD sovereign study by the following morning. It identified two lines screening roughly 65bp cheap to similarly rated single-B peers, with the disbursement as the live catalyst.

Following the July FOMC press conference, the desk received a post-meeting analysis covering the hold, the 9–3 dissent, changes to the statement and a hawk/dove-tagged analysis of the Q&A.

Work that might otherwise consume hours of an analyst’s day was already in hand while the market was still interpreting the event.

Outcome | The Analyst Bench, Without the Bench

Across the book, Orchid Tree now has a repeatable research workflow for the work that would otherwise compete for analyst time:

• Convertibles: Start each day with stock-borrow availability and cost across the underlying equities.

• Relative value: Screen entire sectors in one pass, with dislocations and executable pairs ranked across issuers and currencies.

• Issuer monitoring: Follow companies directly from IR pages and news, distilled into a two-to-three-page investment read.

• Corporate & distressed: Catch overnight filings, rating actions and restructuring events, mapped to the bonds they affect.

• New issues: Run diligence in Orchid Tree’s own framework, including the bear case and an investment decision.

For a focused fund with a broad corporate-credit mandate, the result is more than faster research. Orchid Tree can apply the same depth and discipline across a much larger research surface — without having to build a larger analyst bench.

Looking Ahead | Research That Meets the Desk Where It Works

The next step is reducing the distance between a research question and the workflow that answers it.

With LinqAlpha’s Email Agent, the team can send a research request directly from the inbox and receive the completed analysis there. Scheduled briefings can deliver recurring work — including morning monitoring — before the trading day begins.

The underlying approach stays the same: Orchid Tree’s sources, Orchid Tree’s analytical framework and Orchid Tree’s way of making decisions.

LinqAlpha provides the research infrastructure around it, allowing those workflows to scale as the investment universe grows.

LinqAlpha is an AI research platform built for financial institutions, combining deep analysis, briefing agents and market intelligence with workflows designed around how investment teams actually work.