PROVIDERS ADDED TO THE DATABASE
  • Consumer transaction data on 175k users in the UK: Money Dashboard
  • Bespoke data collected by trained local data collectors worldwide, e.g. monitoring in-store pricing, stocking and execution, consumer interviews, occupancy rates, or events: Native
  • Intellectual property data covering healthcare, autos, and energy: PatentSight
  • Web traffic data focused on identifying total traffic related to a single company across multiple domain names: DataPulse
  • Crowd-sourced event forecasting provider; based out of UPenn study where group of amateur forecasters outperformed experts: Good Judgment
  • Alternative data infrastructure provider for creating structured datasets out of multiple unstructured sources; spun out of Winton, a UK-based quant fund: Hivemind
See full public database of 333 data providers.
UPDATES
  • YipitData launched UK Real Estate product. Dataset tracks PurpleBricks (PURP) for new, active, and sold listings, and Rightmove (RMV), the UK's largest listings aggregator, for market shares of other publicly traded UK real estate agencies. Dataset also tracks PURP penetration in new US markets vs. Redfin (RDFN) and Zillow (ZG). (Request Info)
OPENINGS
EVENTS
NEWS & INSIGHTS
  • AlternativeData.org relaunches with data provider profiles, UX/UI improvements, database category and content filters, cross-website search functionality, and the Getting Started Page.
  • Winton, a UK-based quant fund, spins out its data science unit into standalone alternative data infrastructure provider, Hivemind. (Financial Timessubscription required - Note: AlternativeData.org is cited)
  • Citigroup will put incoming investment banking analysts through Python training. (Bloombergtip: Quandl)
  • Study out of Stanford suggests that pension allocators may do better to use alternative data for risk management, given their longer time horizons and limited agility compared to hedge funds. This new range of use cases from the buy-side could promote increased formation of alternative data providers with a focus on defensive strategies. (Paper)
  • WorldQuant launches Data Exchange, an evaluation platform open to any companies that believe they may have valuable alternative data. (WorldQuant)
  • Building actionable alternative datasets is a massive undertaking: Bertha, the internal AllianceBernstein oil-repository database, took ~15,000 manhours to compile. Hiring for data skill-sets is essential to speeding up this process at large asset managers. (WSJsubscription required)
  • Value-erosion of alternative datasets typically a negligible effect, because 1) a small portion of asset managers are truly equipped to handle the data and 2) those who do use the data implement it in entirely different ways. “There's no real rule book or playbook for how you take satellite imagery data and convert it into an investment signal” - Goldman Sachs PM Osman Ali. (morningstar)