Mall REITs face declining foot traffic

MarketWatch

Alternative data intelligence firm Thasos Group reports negative year-over-year foot traffic trends at mall anchor stores, including Macy’s, Nordstrom, Dillard’s and Sears. Read More   Download Research Report »

Citadel hires top Uber technologist

eFinancialCareers

Surge pricing architect Laszlo Korsos leaves troubled Uber and heads to Citadel as Managing Director and Chief Data Officer. In the tug of war for talent, Wall Street wins this one. Read More

WorldQuant’s tripartite view of alternative data

WorldQuant

Quantitative asset manager WorldQuant recaps the current alternative data landscape and takes a peek into the future of quantitative investing. Read More

The demise of the dark web?

CNET

US and European authorities have shut down the two largest sites on the dark web: AlphaBay and Hansa. Read More

Refresh rate key to Planet’s success

SpaceNews

Planet wins a second contract to provide satellite imagery to the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), beating out contenders UrtheCast, Orbital Insight and Sky Hawk Drone Services. Read More

A petri-dish best served cloned

Bloomberg View

Matt Levine dishes on the new trend for biologists on Wall Street and suggests we simply clone Warren Buffett instead. Read More

Alt data and AI “no longer fiction”

Headoftrading

Opimas CEO analyzes the growing role of AI and alternative data, explaining why we will likely see a consolidation in the hedge fund industry as traditional players fail to adapt. Read More

iRobot bets big on the smart home

Reuters

Over the past couple of years, Roombas haven’t just been collecting dirt and chauffeuring cats around; they’ve become spatial data collection machines. Read More

Reaping investment returns with… algae?

Bloomberg

Do biologists possess the secret to investing on Wall Street? A successful foray into “algae-rithmic trading” reveals surprising similarities between cells and financial markets. Read More

FOMO and the adoption of AI in finance

ValueWalk

We focus so much on the application of AI to alpha generation that it’s easy to forget its other — likely more realistic — applications for capital markets. Read More

Congress weighs in on the farm data debate

AgFunderNews

Concerns about cloud-based farming data and market manipulation are escalating. The US government is stepping in and locking down. Read More

How algorithms go bad

The Guardian

From the unintentionally stupid to the downright nefarious, this article explores four ways in which algorithms can go bad. Read More

IBM Watson’s Wall Street reality check

TechCrunch

Wall Street is paying close attention to the challenges facing IBM Watson. Jefferies believes that IBM’s investment into Watson will struggle to return value to shareholders. Read More

Game-changing AI analytics

Application Development Trends

We’ve come a long way since Moneyball. STATS LLC, a sports analytics company, is at the forefront of artificial intelligence with simply incredible technology. Read More

Satellite imagery to combat fishy activity

Maritime Executive

The illegal fishing market could exceed $20 billion annually. Leave it to satellite imagery and alternative data to help solve the problem. Read More

A Scrap Over Scraping

San Francisco Chronicle

Could web-scraped alternative data be at risk? Data start-up HiQ Labs receives a cease-and-desist letter from LinkedIn, in a case that might set important precedents for the markets. Read More

‘Game of Thornes’ vs. ‘Bearking Bad’

The Wall Street Journal (subscription)

In a clever act of data deception, television networks are intentionally misspelling show names to manipulate their Nielsen ratings. Garbage in, garbage out. Read More

Where Have All the Suckers Gone?

LinkedIn

Eagle’s View Asset Management suggests that the exodus of capital to passive investment strategies is reducing the amount of alpha available to “traditional” quant managers; something new is needed. Read More

A Long Shorts Strategy?

Observer

Banks are relaxing their dress codes in order to attract young tech workers. The last time this happened? February 2000. Could dress codes be an alternative data indicator of impending market crashes? Read More

Wood for the Trees

realwire

Data start-up Rezatec uses satellite imagery to track large-scale tree health for the world’s forests. Read More

Correlation is Looking for Causation

STAT

Alternative data spreads to the venture capital world, where investment firm Correlation Ventures runs a systematic strategy for picking winners in early-stage biotech. Read More

Go long chicken wings if you’re bullish on driverless cars

Bloomberg

While it’s still too early to predict which automaker will build the best driverless car, Morgan Stanley places its bets on leisure activities that will benefit from the self-driving vehicle. Read More

How hedge funds can trade on heaven-sent data

International Business Times

Inexpensive micro satellites called “cube sats” can now provide granular insights on commodities such as oil. Read More

The chink in the armor of interconnected systems

Quartz

Human error is magnified to catastrophic effect in modern trading systems; Nasdaq data glitch causes stocks to jump 3000%. Read More

Algorithmic trading ushers in new era of market automation

Raconteur

The machine-man debate continues with Raconteur’s “Pros and Cons of Automated Trading Systems”. Read More

Quants rule in 2017 Hedge Fund 100

Institutional Investor

While the overall AUM for the industry has dropped for the first time, quant firms have vaulted into top positions in the 2017 Hedge Fund 100. Read More

Here’s why robots could be the future of finance

World Economic Forum

World Economic Forum says global adoption of AI in the investment industry has universities scrambling to include fintech in their business curricula. Read More

A Renaissance of the quants

Reuters

Renaissance Technologies, staffed by nearly eight dozen data scientists, captured more than $3 billion in new money in the first five months of the year. Read More