If your account offers Monitor topics or events, choose it to create a Monitor without a company list. The review step may call the draft a scheduled brief; after you save it, the Monitor list shows the empty company scope as General coverage. It uses Monitor signals and update surfaces, with different source and email options from a company-scoped Monitor.
Use this path when the development matters but the affected company is not known in advance, for example a named regulatory decision or event category. Matching coverage is not guaranteed.
Creating one
In the monitor builder, choose Monitor topics or events instead of Monitor specific companies. If that option is absent, the account is not enabled for company-free Monitors; create a company-scoped Monitor instead or contact the team. Do not try to substitute an empty company set. Then:
- Describe what Portrait should look for — one signal per line, in plain language.
- Choose an email schedule: Morning, Evening, or Morning and evening. Real-time, Daily digest, and Weekly digest are for company-scoped Monitors.
- Name the Monitor, check the optional destination Project, review the completed sections in the stepper, and select Create brief. Creating a Monitor commits estimated ongoing usage. If that commitment would exceed the available credits under the account's current policy, Portrait refuses creation and no Monitor is created; review Settings → Usage and reduce the scope or contact your account team. The manual submit creates it directly.
The manual form uses the default source selection; it does not include a source-selection step. Review Sources on the saved Monitor. Company-free Monitors support documents and news, without the Web or Podcasts source switches.
Verify and refine
Confirm that the saved item appears in the Monitor list with no companies, the intended signals and sources, and the selected email schedule. Matching updates land in Inbox and can also be delivered by email when alerts are enabled. Narrow a noisy topic or revise one that depends on wording the source is unlikely to use.
Evaluation and email timing
Active company-free Monitors are evaluated in two daily cycles, configured to start around 10:30 UTC and 22:30 UTC. Queuing and processing add delay; these are approximate cycle times, not guaranteed email arrival times. Convert UTC to your local time for the date concerned, including daylight-saving changes.
Morning selects email from the first cycle, Evening the second, and both selects both. These labels do not mean your local morning or evening. Selecting only one email cycle, or turning email alerts off, does not stop evaluation or Inbox updates from the other cycle. See Manage a Monitor to change scope or stop ongoing monitoring.
A launch brief can provide initial background after creation. It is separate from later updates and from a 90-day summary. You can export available updates to PDF from the web app.
Up next
Build a monitor around a specific investment thesis.
Recurring Easel investigations
This page describes company-free Monitors, not Scheduled Research. To repeat an Easel investigation with saved instructions and a local-time cadence, use Scheduled Research. Do not apply a Monitor's pause or notification semantics to a scheduled Easel task.