Consumer staples had a good year last year, with the S&P500 consumer staples sub index rising 24%. It is also a sector that fares especially well on the alternative data front. This report is going well and truly back to basics – in multiple senses of the phrase – by gathering data sources from far and wide, to help highlight the options available to consumer staples investors.

As promised, we continue our series on alternative data for healthcare investors by exploring datasets relevant to the analysis of healthcare providers. Specifically, in this piece, we focus on hospital operators and use cases of patient experience surveys. In doing so, we highlight research findings that suggest a correlation between patient-reported experience and hospital profitability.

This week’s Intelligence report goes meta, looking at our most popular pieces of 2019. We also hear directly from Neudata’s Analysts to understand why they believe these ten were the breakout reports amongst institutional investors.

In response to a spike in investor interest, we summarise various alternative datasets that track corporate advertising spend. We also highlight use cases of ad spend data for institutional investors, and anecdotal evidence of the correlation between advertising expenditure and stock returns.

In the following report, we investigate emerging methods of understanding and withstanding market volatility. Our research covers equity crowding, securities lending, estimate and sentiment dispersion, corporate events, and geopolitical (country) risk.

From passenger sentiment to e-receipts and card transactions, there are a wealth of alternative data sources that can be applied to the analysis of airlines beyond traditional performance measures. In this piece, we explore the aforementioned data types as well as alternative datasets that can give an insight into airlines’ costs such as flight delays and fuel.

The growth of alt data is ever-increasing the availability of sources that offer unconventional ways to assess company governance quality. Many of these datasets offer an outside perspective of governance practices by sourcing data points outside of self-reported information. We summarize the availability of datasets that offer insights into ownership structures, leadership quality, shareholder sentiment, governance risks and even psychometric profiles of senior management teams.

We summarise the different ways investors can track a consumer’s journey on Amazon.com, using the website’s own publicly available data. We also discuss several off-the-shelf datasets that are currently available in the market.

From LPs to Spotify, the videocassette to Netflix, the evolution of the entertainment industry has been one of the great Darwinian struggles of our modern age. Most recently, the launch of Disney+ Plus has caused many to reflect on the new-found fragility of the once indomitable original OTTs. Here follows our contribution to the conversation.

It would be fair to say that airlines have had a turbulent 2019. The surge in bankruptcies – affecting Thomas Cook, WOW air, and flybmi – and the grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX have had widespread repercussions. At the same time, certain events can also provide profit-making opportunities. In this report, we summarise how airline investors may utilise alternative data to gain value-additive insights and, in doing so, help manage risk in these turbulent times.