Oil traders watch workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries

Bloomberg (subscription)

In the oil market, a tiny clue– such as the number of people working at a refinery – can be worth millions. Oil companies rarely reveal such information, but traders can gain insight by tracking the number of mobile phones at the plant. Read More

Goldman Sachs investing in ‘unloved’ fintech firms

Quartz

As an avid investor in financial startups, Goldman Sachs thinks there are bargains among the companies that don’t make the headlines, and that these ‘unloved’ startups solve real problems and are great investing opportunities. Read More

Alternative data budgets rise in 2019… or do they?

A-Team Insight

While more than 90% of data providers expect prices of alternative data to rise or remain the same, nearly 60% of buyers say datasets are overpriced. Read More

Futures aren’t just for juice, they’re for truck routes too

Wired

With a new market in truck-delivery futures, investors can speculate on how much it will cost to send goods between US cities, more than a year before a driver climbs into the cab. This first trucking freight futures market is just the latest sign of how trucking is rolling into the digitized 21st century (and provides a new use for Quandl’s LTL Truck Movement dataset). Read More

Goldman Sachs goes open source, kind of

Wall Street Journal (subscription) 

Soon anyone with a GitHub account will be able to see how much Goldman thinks a derivative should cost. This month, Goldman plans to release some of the code that it uses to price securities and manage risk on the popular developer-collaboration site. Read More

Maduro’s land of darkness: monitoring power grid degradation with alternative data

Monash IP Observatory

Monash Business School’s IP Observatory – which monitors the availability and quality of the Internet during events such as elections, disasters, or conflict – has used alternative data to offer granular insights on Venezuela’s month of power outages. Read More

Millions of Facebook records found on Amazon cloud servers

Bloomberg (subscription)

Facebook user data keeps showing up where it shouldn’t. Troves of user data was found to publicly viewable on Amazon’s cloud servers. The problem could be extensive as researchers found around 100,000 open databases, some of which might not have been intended to be public.  Read More

Alternative data, machine learning, chicken biryani, and the future of quant finance

Wilmott Magazine

In a wide-ranging and casual chat reflecting on the 100th issue of his eponymous Quant finance magazine, Paul Wilmott discusses favorite articles, influential papers, alternative data, how quant finance has evolved over three decades and what the future may hold. Read More