Why each PM should have their own data analysts and engineer: "Each PM is going to be trading different names, and will need to access different sets of information. Fighting over centralized quantitative research capacity with other pods is a disaster. And then receiving some kind of report that doesn’t fit into your actual process is useless. Each PM is going to have a different checklist or rubric with different signals."(Integrity Research Watch) A PhD in comparative literature explains an earnings setup where foot traffic data points one way and credit card data the other:  "If we take our traffic data our satellite data we might say, gosh, a ton more people are coming to Walmart. Tons more people are coming to Macy's. If we correlate that and combine it with credit card data, we might see just that transactions actually went down relative to the number of people who came in. If our story is this looks like there's been a lot more people that are coming, that might say, let's go long, but it actually might be a lower conversion rate. If we put these two things together, that actually can impact the story that we tell and I think the art of using our alternative data well is not just collecting as many datasets as possible but collecting the right ones—the ones that not everybody has—and then combining them to really figure out what the moral of the story may be."(Domino Data Lab) Instacart just open sourced a dataset of 3 million online grocery orders (Instacart) Coatue invests in data infrastructure startup Domino Data Lab (WSJ) CFA institute mulling adding “big data” to the financial analyst exam (Reuters) CFA study tried and failed to automate value investing (Institutional Investor) Satellite imagery is more positive on the Chinese economy than official China economic data (MarketWatch) 82% of asset managers plan to increase their investment in big data in 2017 (Fund Strategy)
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