The glue problem
Ask anyone in finance how they do their research and they will list tools, not steps.
A browser with ten tabs. Excel in one window. An AI assistant in another. A screen full of data somewhere. A terminal or a news feed. Each one is good at its job. None of them talk to each other.
Five tools and a human in the middle
So the analyst becomes the glue. A number gets copied from a PDF into a model. A line from a contract gets pasted into a chat to be explained. A figure from the accounts gets checked against a presentation in a different folder. The actual work, the thinking, the value add, sits underneath a constant low tax of moving things between windows and screens.
That tax is easy to underrate, because no single instance of it is large. Thirty seconds to find the file. A minute to re-locate the paragraph you read yesterday. Two minutes to reconcile a number that shows up in three documents with three slightly different values. On their own they are nothing. Across a day, across a deal, they accumulate it’s where the time goes.
What the glue actually costs
The cost is not only time. It is context. Every switch between tools drops something. You had the reason a figure looked off in your head, then a message pulled you away, and when you came back the thread of it was gone. The insight was real for a moment and then it was not, because the place you would have written it down was a fourth window you did not have open. Tool sprawl does not just slow the work. It quietly loses the most valuable parts of it.
There is a reason this persists. Each tool was adopted for a good reason, one at a time, by people solving the problem in front of them. Excel because the model lives there. The AI assistant because it drafts faster than you do. The data room because that is where the documents arrive. Nobody chose the sprawl. It accumulated. And once it is there, the human in the middle is the cheapest available integration, so that is the role the analyst gets handed.
One workspace for the work
This is the problem we’re building around, and it is worth being precise about what “one workspace” means, because it is not a dashboard that links out to the other five tools. It is the work happening in one place. Your documents sit together, linked and searchable as a set rather than as a folder of separate files. You ask a question across all of them at once. A figure you pull stays tied to the page it came from, so you are not copying it into a model and losing the source. The thing you noticed gets to stay where you noticed it.
What changes is not that any single task gets dramatically faster. It is that the gaps between tasks close. The thirty seconds of finding, the minute of re-reading, the context that used to fall through the cracks between windows. That is the work the sprawl was costing you, and it is the work a single workspace gives back.
The context that goes missing
None of this removes the analyst from the centre. It removes the glue from the analyst. The judgement, the thesis, the call on what the numbers mean, all of that is still yours and still the point. What you stop doing is the second job of holding five disconnected tools together with your own attention.
If you have ever finished a long day and struggled to say where the hours actually went, this is usually the answer. Not the thinking. The glue.
FelixOne launches soon. If that is a day you recognise, the waitlist is open at felixresearch.com.
