Identifying and tracking insider activity (i.e. when CEOs sell down shares or what they say on earnings calls) can be a useful way to understand what management thinks about the company ’s future performance. Equally, it could also provide irrelevant, unhelpful signals. In this report, we highlight the challenges, literature and use cases on this subject. We also summarise several datasets that may be of use to readers in tracking different types of insider activity.

Historically, environmental performance data has heavily relied upon disclosure information, which companies are not always obligated to report on. However, recent technological developments have enabled us to measure environmental performance in more advanced ways. These datasets can 1) attribute point sources of invisible greenhouse gas emissions via remote satellite technology, and 2) quantify ESG-related intellectual capital through patent filing analysis.

In 2018, we published a piece discussing the potential correlations between trademark registration volume and firm financial performance. But what about the macroeconomic use case? One year later, we investigate whether trademark filing volume can provide an aggregate indicator of business cycle shifts.

The stock market reaction to a single pharmaceutical event, such as a drug approval, repositioning, or adverse event, can have a spillover effect. Beyond the effect on the associated company’s stock price, an event may trigger a latent movement in the stock price of other publicly traded pharmaceutical companies. Research suggests that these sympathetic price movements may be a result of common attributes shared by the companies (beyond economic fundamentals), which are embedded in human language. In this piece, we explore how investors could leverage NLP to detect these ‘hidden relationships’ and generate alpha from pharmaceutical stocks.

In this Intelligence report, we summarise a few alternative datasets that soft commodity investors can leverage in order to predict the prices of crops. Specifically, the report discusses datasets that can offer investors 1) a leading advantage, and/or 2) more visibility into previously opaque regions.

Just because a company says its business practices are ethical, doesn’t necessarily mean they actually are. Recent studies suggest that companies are able to influence their ESG score by greenwashing corporate sustainability information. In this report, we argue that alternative data can be used to test ethical claims as well as build a more accurate and objective ESG risk signal.

September 14th was an important milestone in the march towards Open Banking. It marked the original deadline for implementation of PSD2 or ‘the second Payment Services Directive.’ If you don’t know what that is, and you are currently purchasing (or thinking of purchasing) European consumer transactional data – you may want to read on. In this report, we introduce the ubiquitous, yet often poorly understood, FinTech phenomenon of Open Banking, and consider the implications of these regulations on both buyers and sellers of alternative data.

In the following Intelligence piece, we explore healthcare claims and electronic health records (EHRs) as alternative data sources for investors. Healthcare claims and EHRs can offer valuable insights into drug/medical device prescribing and utilisation trends. This information has clear applications for investors in pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device/equipment companies as well as companies responsible for paying healthcare claims such as managed care organisations or other health insurers.

Accounting scandals can lead to crippling losses for the uninformed investor - from the Enron and Worldcom scandals to the more recent fraudulent activity of Kangde Xin and Kangmei in China. This article considers the ever-increasing influence of Chinese capital markets, company-level risk factors for financial misreporting, as well as how investors can use alternative data sources to detect early signs of malfeasance by China-listed companies.

Last week, it was announced that leading telehealth provider, Teladoc (NYSE: TDOC), observed a 33% increase in share price and a 40% increase in revenue, year to date. At Neudata, we thought it would be as good a time as any to discuss some alternative datasets that could help investors predict some key metrics of telehealth companies.