Investors may want to pay more attention to intangible assets. As a percentage of total assets on S&P 500 constituents’ balance sheets, intangibles have risen from 17% in 1975 to over 84% today. Many datasets that measure intangibles are relatively unknown and under-utilized – perhaps offering a degree of edge to some investors. In this report we outline where to find alternative data sources that measure 3 types of intangibles: 1) brand value, 2) human capital and 3) intellectual property.

In this month’s tidbits, we look back at the most popular Neudata Intelligence themes from the past year, share some new alternatives to alternative datasets, inform our quant readers of a new back testing opportunity and draw attention to more commercial and academic interest in intellectual property data.

Last week saw the conclusion of Apple and Qualcomm’s much talked about royalties and patent lawsuit. While Qualcomm observed a 23% stock price surge following the lawsuit win, Apple, interestingly, managed to observe a stable stock price despite their loss. In this Intelligence piece, we summarize a 2018 academic paper that investigates the relationship between litigation and stock returns. Specifically, the paper examines whether portfolios consisting of public companies involved in lawsuits could observe positive returns, despite its negative perception.

Sentiment can be found in places other than text-based language. We introduce an academic paper that correlates market sentiment with news article photos and consider whether or not multimodal sentiment analysis (derived from audio, images, video) has a future in the landscape of alternative data.

Drug development pipelines are the foundation on which pharma and biotech companies build their future success. Consequently, share price volatility is commonplace around the announcement of clinical trial results. In this report, we expand on our previous work - Using Alt Data to Evaluate Pharma Pipelines – by exploring a) the impact of clinical trial outcomes on the market value of pharma and biotech companies and b) predictive factors that could be used to estimate clinical trial outcomes.

2019 marks the start of the next generation of communication: 5G. While the US and China rollout the technology using existing 4G networks and infrastructure, we look forward to 2025 - when 5G is expected to be operating without any reliance on its predecessor. In this Intelligence report, we use alternative data to try to answer 1) which telco operators are likely to dominate the market six years from now, and 2) how much they stand to earn with their innovations.

A growing amount of literature examines the relationship between financial performance and employee sentiment, as measured by crowdsourced company ratings and reviews. In particular, recent studies assess the ability of these datasets to forecast stock returns and earnings surprises, since changes in employee satisfaction levels can signal shifts in the economic condition of the firm. In this report we 1) highlight the predictive characteristics of employee feedback data, 2) discuss the limitations of these datasets and offer possible solutions, and 3) provide a market summary of crowdsourced employee review datasets.

Highlights of this month’s tidbits include: a shake-up in the satellite & aerial space, agricultural data trials, movements in both SDK and cell-tower location data, and yet another edition of Alt Data Around the World – this time with the exciting new addition of Latin America.

The public narrative around Brexit has reached the point where it is now impossible to see the woods for the trees. In the following piece, we ask 1) What even is Brexit? 2) How can an investor better gauge their exposure to it? 3) How can we obtain higher-frequency, lower-latency macro indicators? 4) Is it possible to preempt corporate reactions?