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.

Consumer staples had a (relatively) good year last year, with the S&P500 consumer staples subindex 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.