The growing supply of alternative data sources that offer insights into the ESG practices of the firm provides investors with more opportunities to build their own ESG ratings methodology. One that is better suited to a fund’s mandates, investment goals and offers edge. But where to find the data?

We explore the relationship between pharmaceutical companies’ patent portfolios and their financial performance. We also discuss the significance of different patent indicators to financial metrics (e.g. sales, market value, ROI) through evaluating findings from several research studies. Finally, we suggest several alternative data providers who can provide analysts with such metrics.

There are many factors that impact the price of crude oil, such as production, imports/exports, and geopolitical events. However, it is widely accepted that inventory levels are one of the most crucial drivers of the asset’s price in the market. In this Intelligence report, we discuss whether crude oil storage estimates, specifically those obtained through satellites, can generate alpha to institutional investors interested in gaining an edge on pricing.

We highlight key findings from a research paper published by data science company that analyses an alternative provider of labour market data, covering the near-universe of online job vacancy postings. The paper analysed the potential of online job ads for: 1) predicting key US labor statistics, 2) forecasting stock returns and industry sales of the energy equipment and service sector, and 3) assessing the relationship between a firm’s online job postings growth and its operational and stock performance.

With Black Friday 2018 behind us, we look at some of the key insights that alternative data providers have derived from their e-receipt, advertising, and clickstream datasets. Based on these insights, we provide a round-up of some key takeaways, including the winners and losers of this year’s holiday period. Companies mentioned include, but are not limited to, Target, Amazon, Walmart, Costco, and Pandora.

In this Intelligence report, we highlight key findings from a backtest that was carried out by an alternative data provider earlier this year on their proprietary US corn production forecasts. We also compare the vendor's results to those observed by a competing US corn yield forecaster.

Whether you call it web scraping, web crawling or spidering, programmatic data access and extraction belongs to the realm of technologies that have outpaced developments within the world of legislation. In the following piece, we provide an introduction to legal theories and concepts that have proven relevant to web scraping activities, as well as some widely accepted guidelines for good bot behaviour.

Empirical evidence suggests that the financial performance of companies is inversely correlated with employee turnover. More interestingly, we look into this subject in more depth by assessing whether this relationship is exacerbated or dampened across particular industries or level of employee seniority. We also outline several alternative data providers we believe are best placed to provide such predictive turnover analytics.

Ahead of the 2018 holiday season we look back to Black Friday 2017 and perform a proprietary analysis of how investors can utilise advertising and clickstream datasets to predict the performance of retailers over this period. In particular, we focus on three large US retailers: Walmart, Target, and Kohl’s.

We recently discussed how the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) generates superior returns at a lower systematic risk. In this piece, we discuss Net Promoter Scores (NPS) – a popular measurement of customer loyalty – and whether it is an appropriate metric for investment managers aiming to predict company financial performance.