Quandl Announces Series B Financing Round of USD 12m

Hedgeweek

Not that we’ll get in the habit of writing about ourselves, but we figured this news would qualify. We raised $12 million in Series B funding and have welcomed Naren Gupta of Nexus Venture Partners to our board of directors. Read More

Wall Street’s Insatiable Lust: Data, Data, Data

The Wall Street Journal

Bradley Hope from the Wall Street Journal unveils a new species: The Data Hunter. He who roams the earth in search of alternative datasets to feed Wall Street’s lust for data, data, data. Read More

Fake Accounts and Artisanal Data

Bloomberg

With algorithms and artifical intelligence seemingly poised to replace humans in the investment world, Matt Levine highlights the very human aspect of the hunt for data. The robot shouts “BRING ME MORE DATA” to the human. But at least the human is still involved. Read More

In Defence of Hedge-fund Data Mining

The Financial Times

Alexandra Scaggs from the Financial Times offers this thoughtful piece on the implications of alternative data: ethical, legal and otherwise. Though it’s easy to assume yet more loss of consumer privacy, she rightly asks if what hedge funds are doing is any different from targeted advertising or government surveillance. Read More

Automated Earnings Estimates From Retail Transactions

Bloomberg

Do you eagerly wait for analyst estimates each quarter? Tokyo-based Nowcast Inc. is aiming to crunch millions of retail transactions to automate earnings’ predictions for some 200 Japanese companies later this year. In 2017, they hope to include another 1,000 companies in China and the US. And so begins the end of analyst estimates… Read More

The Eternal Quest for Unique Investment Insights

Investment Magazine

Have you heard this one before? Mining alpha from academic research papers. A small group of investors believe investment insights await deep within tens of thousands of research papers produced each year from universities worldwide. It’s no small feat to sift through academic research from the present and the past. Will such an effort literally pay off? Read More

The Next Platform for Innovation is Wi-Fi

Medium

Surprisingly, Wi-Fi is a word hardly mentioned when ruminating on the Inernet of Things and the explosion of data, but is it not the powerful catalyst that makes the transfer of all this data possible? In an ode to wi-fi, read on to see the gold in them there hills. Read More

Hedge Fund Mining Draws Ire; Is The ‘Alternative-Data’ Playing Field Rigged?

Benzinga

And now for the contrarian view: Benzinga likens alternative data to insider trading and argues that expensive alternative data isn’t truly public information. What do you think? Read More

7Park Data Now Mines TV Viewing Habits of Over 1 Million OTT Subscribers

7 PARK DATA BLOG AND INSIGHTS

For investors in entertainment and media, the granular and never-before-seen nature of this TV data is enticing. Our friends at 7Park have just launched the first “TV Intelligence” dataset. Get up close and personal with the likes of Netflix and Hulu. Read More