Despite decades of innovation in financial markets, one persistent paradox remains: active investment management is overflowing with data, yet underwhelming in performance. Portfolio managers have access to more information, tools, and insights than ever before. Yet, the majority still fail to consistently beat their benchmarks.
Reports continue to show that 90% of active public equity fund managers underperform their index over long periods. Source: SPIVA Scorecard. The reasons are complex, but a recurring theme emerges: traditional investment models are built on outdated assumptions, and many of today’s analytics tools explain the past better than they guide the future.
Bridging the Gap Between Possibilities and the Unachievable
In an industry where every decision carries weight and every misstep has consequences, the ability to navigate volatility and detect genuine market signals—not just noise—has become a defining edge. And yet, trend recognition remains underused or misunderstood by many institutional investors. That gap between what’s possible and what’s practiced has become the central focus for a new class of financial innovators. They aren’t just asking what went wrong—they’re rethinking how modern investing should actually work.
Among them is Rocco Pellegrinelli (Founder and CEO), a former portfolio manager who turned his frustration with conventional tools into a lifelong mission to bring clarity, evidence, and precision back into the hands of investment professionals. From building one of the earliest portfolio intelligence platforms to founding Trendrating, a global provider of advanced analytics, Rocco’s journey reflects a larger shift underway in asset management, where intuition is tempered by data, and alpha is no longer just a hope but a measurable pursuit.
Where Questions Begin, Innovation Follows
For Rocco Pellegrinelli, investment wasn’t just about returns; it was about truth. Early in his career as a portfolio manager, he wasn’t satisfied with what conventional tools could offer. They looked promising, yes, but did they deliver? Were they helping managers make better decisions, or merely validating what they already believed?
These weren’t abstract questions. They were grounded in results. Many systems sounded compelling on paper but lacked substance when markets moved unpredictably. “Many analytical tools make sense, but do they also make money?” Rocco would often ask a question that remains central to his thinking today.
Driven by this pursuit of real value, he embarked on a journey that would redefine how professional investors approach alpha generation and risk management. Over two decades, Rocco transitioned from managing portfolios to building platforms that now serve thousands of investment professionals worldwide.
Foundations in FinTech
Long before fintech became a buzzword, Rocco had already taken a bold step. In 1996, he founded Brainpower, a company dedicated to building high-performance portfolio management systems. As Chairman and CEO, he led the business with a singular focus: solving actual problems faced by fund managers in real time.
Brainpower didn’t just offer another product; it introduced a new way to look at portfolio intelligence. The response was swift. The platform gained international traction, and in 2000, it went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange—an achievement few fintech companies could claim at the time. In 2006, Bloomberg acquired Brainpower, recognizing its role in shaping the analytics layer for professional investors.
But for Rocco Pellegrinelli, the acquisition wasn’t the end. It was an inflection point. He had seen where the cracks were in the active management model and was now convinced that new problems needed new answers. That’s when the vision for his next venture took form.
The Problem with Active Management
The numbers speak for themselves. Over the past two decades, active managers have struggled to deliver on their core promise: outperforming the benchmark.
- 93% of all mutual funds underperformed the S&P Composite 1500
- 94% of large-cap funds lagged the S&P 500
- 95% of mid-cap funds trailed the S&P MidCap 400
- 94% of multi-cap funds didn’t keep pace with the S&P Composite 1500
Despite the energy, resources, and intellect poured into active strategies, the outcomes paint a sobering picture. The reason, according to Rocco Pellegrinelli, is that the tools and models used by most professionals are outdated. They focus too much on conventional metrics while ignoring market dynamics like trend strength and dispersion.
“Managers have access to a wealth of data,” he says, “but most of it explains what happened, not what is happening.”
Trendrating: Where Data Meets Direction
Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Lugano, Switzerland, Trendrating is Rocco’s answer to the structural weaknesses in active portfolio management. The company delivers advanced analytics that enable fund managers to measure, validate, and act upon price trends in a timely, data-driven way.
Trendrating’s core belief is simple: understanding and respecting price trends is not optional—it is essential. The market doesn’t move based solely on fundamentals. It reflects sentiment, momentum, and patterns that often precede headline events. Ignoring those signals can cost portfolios dearly.
Trendrating empowers professionals to stay ahead by using evidence-based insights to identify outperformers and avoid laggards. It’s not about forecasting the future—it’s about aligning portfolios with real-time truths the market is already revealing.
One key metric that Rocco believes is underestimated in the industry is performance dispersion—the range of returns between the best- and worst-performing stocks in the same universe. This spread is what gives active managers an opportunity to generate alpha, provided they’re positioned correctly.
Take the S&P 500 as an example. Over the past six months, the top 25% of stocks returned an average of 18%, while the bottom 25% lost 22%, creating a 40% performance gap. But how many managers consistently capture that upside and avoid the downside?
The answer, Rocco Pellegrinelli realized, is very few. Traditional models often fail to identify the right side of the dispersion. Trendrating, by contrast, helps managers track, measure, and tilt portfolios toward favorable trend dynamics. It translates market complexity into simple, actionable insights.
TCR: A New Standard for Portfolio Intelligence
Dismissing market trends is not just shortsighted; it’s downright risky. In today’s fast-moving and often volatile markets, respecting and understanding trends is critical to effective risk management and long-term portfolio success.
Trendrating empowers portfolio managers with sophisticated, data-driven tools that go far beyond traditional risk metrics. Trendrating invented the rating of medium-term price trends of individual stocks using a multi-factor model that measures buying versus selling pressure as trends are produced by investors’ money flows balance.
Positive trends are captured by A and B ratings, while falling trends are identified with C or D ratings. By objectively analyzing price trends and market behavior, it detects early warning signs of trend breakdowns or rising volatility, giving investors crucial time to take defensive action.
Ignoring these signals leaves portfolios vulnerable to sudden losses, but respecting them helps reduce exposure to underperforming or unstable stocks before losses escalate, dramatically improving resilience.
The Edge: Trend Capture Rating (TCR)
Trendrating’s solution offers mission-critical portfolio intelligence via the Trend Capture Rating (TCR) for active portfolios. The TCR is the aggregated, weighted rating of all holdings, measuring the risk of allocation to falling stocks. It provides a clear metric to evaluate and audit a portfolio in terms of its exposure to stocks in a well-defined bull trend versus securities in a clear bear phase.
The higher the TCR, the better the expected portfolio performance. This portfolio rating has strong predictive value regarding relative returns.
As Trendrating emphasizes: “The analysis of portfolio allocation across positive and negative trends is a rock-solid metric with predictive value about relative returns when associated with a similar analysis for the benchmark.”
The TCR is truly a game changer for active managers. For example, if a portfolio’s TCR is rated B-, and C and D-rated stocks make up 30% of the portfolio, while the benchmark’s TCR is B+ with only 15% of C/D securities in the index, the probability for the active portfolio to beat the benchmark is low. By raising the portfolio’s TCR to B+ or higher, the chances of substantially outperforming increase.
What sets Trendrating apart is its multi-factor model, which delivers a truly holistic risk profile. This advanced intelligence empowers managers to dynamically adjust allocations as market conditions evolve, staying ahead of risks and opportunities.
Trendrating analytics add mission-critical intelligence to any investment approach and focus, including value, growth, ESG, size, volatility, and more. Adding TCR analysis can remarkably improve fundamentally driven investment strategies by combining strong fundamentals with proven price action predictive analytics.
In short, Trendrating transforms risk management from a reactive necessity into a powerful strategic advantage, enabling investors to safeguard capital, minimize drawdowns, and confidently pursue alpha with disciplined precision.
Trendrating is not prescriptive. It doesn’t tell managers what style to adopt. Instead, it strengthens whatever approach they use. Whether the strategy is value, growth, ESG, low-volatility, or sector-specific, the platform acts as a validation layer. It ensures that selections backed by fundamentals are also confirmed by positive trends. And if they’re not, it flags them before they become a drag.
This dual-filter methodology—fundamentals and trend analytics—is what Rocco believes will shape the future of equity investing. Managers will increasingly need both lenses to survive in volatile and fragmented markets.
The ‘All-in-One’ Platform
One of Trendrating’s key differentiators is that it doesn’t just deliver data; it provides a complete toolkit to design, test, and execute strategies.
Users can:
- Choose from hundreds of parameters (fundamental, quantitative, size, volatility, and trend-based)
- Define allocation and rebalancing rules
- Backtest over 15+ years of data, spanning multiple market cycles
- Optimize rule combinations based on performance stability
- Validate each rule with comprehensive performance attribution
- Implement live strategies directly within the platform
This unified environment bridges the gap between idea generation and execution. It gives managers confidence, not just in the rationale but in the results.
Evidence-Based Edge in Risk Management
Risk management is often misunderstood as damage control. But as Rocco Pellegrinelli sees it, it’s about anticipation, not reaction. Most conventional methodologies report risk after damage has begun.
Trendrating shifts that paradigm. By incorporating trend analytics, the platform provides early warnings on deteriorating holdings and rising volatility. This gives money managers enough time to make informed decisions and avoid unnecessary drawdowns. It also allows for benchmarking risk-adjusted performance more intelligently. By comparing a portfolio’s TCR with that of its benchmark, managers can gauge relative positioning, expected performance deviation, and downside exposure.
Global Recognition and Accolades
For over a decade, Trendrating has helped hundreds of global money managers maximize performance while enhancing risk control. In today’s challenging stock market cycle, clients need superior data and solutions that provide up-to-date market intelligence to exploit the broad performance dispersion across stocks.
Conventional data and traditional research often capture and explain trends only after the fact. To stay ahead of the curve, advanced technology and leading-edge solutions are essential—this is precisely Trendrating’s mission.
Trendrating offers a new, disruptive, AI-driven suite of analytics and technology designed to measure performance dispersion and objectively rate price trends. The platform filters out market noise, subjective opinions, and disputable research, delivering clear, actionable insights.
Trendrating’s excellence has been recognized through several prestigious awards:
- 2019 – Top Portfolio Analytics Solution Provider, CIO Outlook
- 2020 – Best Fintech Companies to Watch, Tech Outlook
- 2021 – Best Data Analytics Company, CIO Bulletin
- 2022 – Best Strategy Management Provider, CIO Bulletin
- 2023 – Top Performance Management Platform, Enterprise World
- 2024 – Top 50 Most Innovative Companies, CEO Views
- 2025 – Most Trusted Advanced Market Analytics Provider, Visionary CIO
The Mission Ahead: Rocco’s Perspective
Rocco Pellegrinelli, Founder and CEO of Trendrating, began his career as a portfolio manager before launching Brainpower in 1996, one of the world’s leading portfolio management systems. After taking Brainpower public and its subsequent acquisition by Bloomberg, Rocco spearheaded the development of a superior price trend model.
Through exhaustive testing of thousands of indicators across decades and thousands of securities, his vision culminated in Trendrating, a global leader in advanced market analytics.
Recognized as one of the “10 Most Inspiring CEOs to Watch” and a Nasdaq contributor, Rocco continues to drive innovation in equity investing.
“Markets are more complex than ever,” he says. “But complexity is manageable when you have the right tools. Our mission is to remove the noise and bring clarity. Not through opinions, but through facts.”
