Top 10 M&A deals revealed by corporate jet monitoring

Quandl

Quandl’s Corporate Aviation Intelligence – which tracks the private jet flights of over 9,000 firms – provided investors with advance indication of many of 2018’s most significant M&A deals. Here are the 10 largest. Read More

How firms value alternative datasets

Global Banking & Finance Review

To see which alternative datasets are most valued most today, and what data is expected to be valuable in the future, FactSet and Coleman Parkes surveyed alt-data users from 50 hedge funds and global institutional investors. Read More

Shutdown deprives Fed of essential data

Bloomberg (subscription)

Timely information on economic growth, jobs, consumer spending and inflation is crucial to monetary policy making. Now, the longest government shutdown on record has cut the Fed’s access to many of these key numbers. Separately, in a January 18 speech, New York Fed chief John Williams says the central bank is increasingly looking beyond official data on GDP, inflation, and employment and is increasingly considering alternative data sources. Read More

New chapters in innovation and disruption will be written in 2019

Adena Friedman, LinkedIn

Ahead of the World Economic Forum, the Nasdaq CEO considers investment and technology trends that may dominate in the coming year. Read More

How Tesla layoffs could have been predicted

Thinknum

In his letter announcing a 7% staff cut, Elon Musk brought up several numbers when describing the company’s growth. Thinknum fact-checked his claims and dove into data to answer whether the layoffs could have been anticipated. Read More

There is a specter haunting Europe – the specter of data privacy regulation

Multiple sources

A number of stories this past week strongly indicate that we’ll see a lot more data regulation in 2019. Germany’s antitrust regulator is dissecting Facebook’s entire business model. London’s FCA is set to make it tougher for hedge funds to access poll data. Multinational law firm Baker McKenzie provides an infographic on how a no-deal Brexit may impact data protection. In Davos, a day after being fined US$57m over privacy, Google’s CFO says data is more like sunlight than oil (signalling, perhaps, fear that the company could be broken up like Standard Oil was in the early 20th century). Meanwhile across the pond, Apple’s Tim Cook has called for FTC to establish a data-broker clearinghouse, requiring them to let consumers track the transactions that have bundled and sold their data.

Smells like teen spirit: How 2018 for data was like 1991 for rock

Suburbia

Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind. Read More