We highlight key findings from a Harvard Business School study that combines traditional ESG scores with alternative data sources that measure public sentiment momentum on corporate sustainability performance. The study finds that an ESG factor that goes long on firms with high or improving ESG performance and negative sentiment momentum, and short on firms with low or decreasing ESG performance and positive sentiment momentum delivers significant positive alpha.

As the use of alternative data within the investment community grows more prevalent, this prompts questions on dataset crowding and its implications for alpha generation. While opinions may be divided on the significance of buy-side client numbers in evaluating a dataset, an analysis of dataset crowding serves as an interesting source of insight into the interplay between supply and demand for different data types. In the following analysis, we explore: (1) levels of dataset crowding across different dataset types, (2) supply and demand for four dataset types: web scraping, web & app tracking, ESG, and location, (3) the types of data that will be most valued by investors in the future.

Although alternative data providers are united on the front that mobile gaming is a steadily growing market, they are, however, divided on its exact size. In this Intelligence report, we historically compare predictions made by three mobile gaming data vendors, and take a closer look as to why there is such a divergence in their estimates.

The past years have seen an emergence of numerous providers offering either signal outputs or analytics tools that rely on Natural Language Processing. In this Neudata Intelligence piece, we introduce several basic tenants of NLP, a selection of ‘alt data’ applications, and finally ask – how can a prospective user evaluate such products in the pre-testing phase?

Our roundup of some of the most interesting alternative data provider updates over the past month. This month, US transactional data providers gear up for the year ahead, some positive updates from new alt data entrants, and agricultural data saves the day.