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.