Alternative Data News and Insight

From passenger sentiment to e-receipts and card transactions, there are a wealth of alternative data sources that can be applied to the analysis of airlines beyond traditional performance measures. In this piece, we explore the aforementioned data types as well as alternative datasets that can give an insight into airlines’ costs such as flight delays and fuel.

The growth of alt data is ever-increasing the availability of sources that offer unconventional ways to assess company governance quality. Many of these datasets offer an outside perspective of governance practices by sourcing data points outside of self-reported information. We summarize the availability of datasets that offer insights into ownership structures, leadership quality, shareholder sentiment, governance risks and even psychometric profiles of senior management teams.

We summarise the different ways investors can track a consumer’s journey on Amazon.com, using the website’s own publicly available data. We also discuss several off-the-shelf datasets that are currently available in the market.

From LPs to Spotify, the videocassette to Netflix, the evolution of the entertainment industry has been one of the great Darwinian struggles of our modern age. Most recently, the launch of Disney+ Plus has caused many to reflect on the new-found fragility of the once indomitable original OTTs. Here follows our contribution to the conversation.

It would be fair to say that airlines have had a turbulent 2019. The surge in bankruptcies – affecting Thomas Cook, WOW air, and flybmi – and the grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX have had widespread repercussions. At the same time, certain events can also provide profit-making opportunities. In this report, we summarise how airline investors may utilise alternative data to gain value-additive insights and, in doing so, help manage risk in these turbulent times.

In this Intelligence report, we take a look at the current state of the alt data market for oil and gas investors. Specifically, the report will discuss 1) exactly what alt datasets are appropriate for this sector, 2) use cases for such datasets, and 3) the level of demand we see from investment managers for oil and gas data.

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.