DATA PROVIDER DATABASE

New Datasets

• Slingshot Aerospace - Data provider with satellite, aerial, and drone capabilities.
• Dun & Bradstreet (PAYDEX) - Tracks company health with dollar-weighted score for how promptly a business pays its bills.
• Gyana - UK geolocation data provider.
• h2o - Machine learning platform allowing insights without data science expertise.
• Brain Company - Sentiment data provider using public data.
• Endor - Predictive engine generating results from questions asked in plain language; has applications in consumer research.
• Bitvore - Identifies ticker-level price inflections from analyzing the news.

• Nowcast, a Japanese transaction data provider, teamed up with CCC Marketing to forecast company sales based on T-card data, a popular rewards card generating $63 billion in annual purchases. (Bloomberg)
• Thasos Group, a geolocation provider, formed agreement with Chinese government to assess GDP growth on district level.
• ExtractAlpha, a social/sentiment provider, added new ClosingBell dataset providing crowd-sourced buy/sell ratings from a collaborative trading app.
• See full public database of 218 data providers.

NEW JOBS

• Data Scientist-Research Analyst - Investment Manager (New York)
• Long-Short Primary Research Analyst - D.E. Shaw & Co. (New York)
• See 57 other openings for Investment Research, Data Analyst, Data Engineer, and Data Scientist

NEWS & INSIGHTS

• D.E. Shaw used alternative data to win a seat on the board of Lowe’s. Using satellite, census, and survey data, the fund made their case that an additional $8 billion in annual revenue was left on the table. (WSJ, subscription required)
• Competition for alternative data analyst talent is escalating across hedge funds and long-onlies. Full analysis to be published on AlternativeData.org. (Financial Times, subscription required)
• Integrity Research went deep into the history of legal challenges to alternative data usage and best practices for compliance with trading regulations. (Integrity Research, long read)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation, Internet Archive, and DuckDuckGo filed amicus brief supporting HiQ and attacking LinkedIn’s suggestion that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act should be used to limit web scraping of publicly available data. (Integrity Research, subscription required)
• Three articles discussed the challenges faced in using quantitative techniques to make investment decisions.
  • “We have yet to find quantitative techniques that can anticipate human behavior. . . . Our fundamental process exists to . . . understand those changes on the margin. . . . Our quantitative group is really responsible for helping us establish accurate starting points.” - Ryan Caldwell, Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer, Chiron Investment Management. (Forbes)
  • “To me the biggest challenge is processing — being able to build that pipeline. The actual code to derive the alpha part is so much smaller than the whole wrapper around it which is focused on cleaning and processing, reconciliation and post-trade processes.” - Mansi Singhal, Co-Founder, qplum. (finextra)
  • A case study on Voleon fund showed how quant strategies are harder in practice than in theory. (WSJ, subscription required)
• Earnest Research, a credit card transaction provider, published findings that AMZN received 89% of all holiday spending across Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and itself. (Bloomberg)
• Sentieo, a data interface, showed that analyst sentiment moved favorably on utilities last quarter, while manager sentiment trended negatively. (Forbes)

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