The outbreak of coronavirus was a massive shock to an already fragile global economy – causing many markets to slip into recession earlier last month. Much about COVID-19 remains uncertain, however, alternative data can offer investors and policymakers greater clarity on its most damaging impacts. We outline the datasets that offer timely signals of the most affected areas of the global macroeconomy.

From layoffs to discussions of bailouts, it has been a turbulent few weeks for the global hospitality industry as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this Intelligence report, we provide a deep dive into the various alternative datasets that can be used by investors to monitor the state of the industry, specifically the lodging, cruise, and restaurant sectors.

To aid our clients in navigating the unprecedented situation that the global economy now faces, we have collated a list of 80 free alternative data sources, over 90% of which are updated at weekly-or-higher frequencies. Highlights include human temperature mapping from smart thermometers, country-level internet pressure tracking, and global foot traffic data sourced from 128 countries.

Where to begin? As of March 11th, the world has been officially diagnosed with a pandemic and is now standing on the brink of a global recession. Here follows Neudata’s attempt to guide our clients through the most pertain alternative data products: from China’s recovery, to macro-level economic insights, supply chain analysis, healthcare and tourism sectors, and, finally, epidemiological data on the virus itself.

Anyone interested in the global live streaming industry must study the China market, which is enormous in terms of both users and demographics. Chinese streaming companies occupy a leading position with regards to new streaming technology, gamification, monetization methods, and product design. In the following report, we provide an introduction to the market itself, as well as how investors can leverage alternative data to analyse the revenue and performance of different categories of live streaming and short video platforms.

The lack of industry consensus on whether ESG integration compromises on returns stems from the lack of uniformity across ESG ratings methodologies. In short - different ESG datasets result in differing financial outcomes. In this report, we summarize the academic studies, investment strategies and datasets that have been empirically proven to add alpha from ESG.

Datasets derived from the Internet of Things often lie on the fringe of the established alternative data universe. They are rarities or curiosities. In our IoT series, we shed light on the technologies that enable device connectivity, issues of data ownership, and alt data applications of IoT technology. In part one, we take a big picture approach by providing an introduction to IoT search engines.

Given the recent spate of dataset terminations, we thought it pertinent to share our insight on the topic of permanency risk. For an industry reliant on the sharing of data, it comes as no surprise that the ever-growing spotlight on data privacy has huge implications for dataset permanency risk. As the alternative data space becomes increasingly saturated, it’s also the case that lower quality datasets are getting filtered out of the market more quickly. So what do these developments mean for data buyers?

In this report, we discuss what weather data is, how it is collected, how investors can access it, and the various investment use cases of weather data.

Relative to governance and environmental dimensions, investors find social factors the most difficult to incorporate into ESG analysis. Difficulty in defining social factors, their qualitative nature and the lack of corporate reporting on social issues are barriers to integrating these factors into investment decisions. Alt data sources, however, can offer investors ways to quantify qualitative social factors that need not rely on corporate disclosure information. In this report, we outline where to find datasets that measure social factors and how they can be integrated into an ESG strategy.