Alternative Data News and Insight

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.

Royal Dutch (although not for much longer) Shell recently made headlines by changing its share structure. Since traditional data also informs this kind of governance-related issue, why would investors also use alternative data to assess corporate governance? This report explores dataset types that provide less conventional governance insights, augment more common processes, and enhance stewardship and engagement.

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.