Last week, Apple held its annual Worldwide Developer Conference. Over the five days, the group shared several new developments – some expected, others not so much. In this Intelligence report, we summarise three key takeaways from WWDC22 that could impact alternative data.

Shanghai’s two-month lockdown reportedly ended on the 1st of June. But the economic disruption caused by China’s continued adherence to its zero-Covid policy will be hard to recover from overnight. With rising consumer pessimism, falling house prices and increasing corporate defaults, the list of negative impacts of China’s lockdown is growing. In this Intelligence report, we look at some of the datasets that may be helpful in measuring the impact of China’s zero-COVID policy on the broader economy.

Japan, a far east island country, sits on the boundary of four tectonic plates, with 10 times the population density of the US but a third of its arable land. This resource scarcity and deadly earthquakes make the Japanese meticulous and risk-averse. The country's alternative data market may give a similar impression: lagging and conservative. While this statement may have been true a few years ago, the data market has been growing since COVID-19, shaping a new landscape that is worth exploring.

Central banks around the world have been raising rates to tackle inflation. Further increases are expected until the end of the year. Unsurprisingly, this has driven investor interest in analyzing central bank sentiment to anticipate monetary policy changes. In this report, we summarise the data landscape of vendors that offer central bank analytics to determine hawkish/dovish sentiment.

We reflect on an area of alternative data that has recently seen increased interest from data buyers: emerging markets. We utilise our position in the industry as well as our own proprietary metadata, to look at the alternative data landscape in this relatively obscure region.

In this Intelligence report, we conduct an overview of the POS transactional data market. Further, we provide intelligence on potential market entries to the space and how those may impact the market.

Corporations may have a skeletal external data team at first. This intelligence piece lays out the roles needed in the process of onboarding external data, and the existing service providers that these functions can be outsourced to. We also analyse the results from a recent Neudata survey of 45 data providers on corporate data buyers’ needs.

In this Intelligence report, we consider how external data can be used beyond an investment use case. We focus on corporations, introducing these organisations to the challenges in external data adoption, the process of sourcing external data, and assessing the benefits of investing in an external data infrastructure.

We outline the key datasets available to monitor the industrials sector, namely within the aerospace, building materials, machinery/heavy equipment, chemicals, and transportation sub-sectors. We also discuss some of the nuances within this vast data landscape, including core dataset challenges.

Two European Nation-States are at war for the first time since 1945. Few commentators have chosen to underplay its significance. At the very least, it is likely to extend supply chain disruptions in the wake of covid. Over the longer term, it could also constitute a paradigm shift for the outlook of countries, companies, and the general population. We highlight five key data types that could help readers to navigate the immediate and extended impacts of the conflict. (NB: this is not intended as an exhaustive list of the war’s impacts or data types that could provide insights.)