Facebook, World Bank and OECD Link Up to Gather Data

Bloomberg

The World Bank and the OECD are leveraging Facebook’s access to small businesses to create a new business sentiment index. The index will be derived from surveying small businesses through the Facebook platform. If it works, this could be a bottoms-up realtime view of the global small business economy (minus China). Read More

Two Sigma Says Artificial Intelligence Lacks Smarts

Bloomberg

Quantitative hedge funds as a group have outperformed traditional managers over the last 5 years, partially thanks to good old-fashioned common sense. Two Sigma’s David Siegel cautions investors not to overvalue AI, stating that algorithms are limited by scant amounts of training data. So the robots haven’t taken over, yet. Read More

I Listened to 82 Finance Startup Pitches – Here’s What I Learned About Where Wall Street Is Heading

Business Insider

Tina Wadwha from Business Insider listened to fintech pitches at Finovate Fall 2016 and Techstars Barclays Accelerator. Her conclusion? Most of them aren’t trying to take the place of established players; they are looking to sell to them. See what she thinks of startups like MapD and Alpha Exchange. Read More

Bloomberg Subscribers Can Now Post To Twitter From The Terminal

PR Newswire

We’ve been wondering how Bloomberg would capitalize on the alternative data trend, and now we know: direct from the source. Bloomberg subscribers can now tweet directly from the terminal, giving Bloomberg, arguably, its own sentiment data to sell. Read More

Upstream Operational Risk Increases with Anadarko’s $2B Purchase

Quandl Blog

The Quandl data science team now publishes market insights based on analysis performed using Quandl alternative datasets. For this report we examined natural gas production trends for Anadarko (NYSE: APC) in the wake of its 2B purchase of the deepwater Gulf of Mexico assets of Freeport McMoRan Oil & Gas. While the purchase seems sound, interruptions to gas flow throughout the year may be cause for concern. Read More

State Street Curates Unstructured Data for Investor Insights

Finextra

State Street gets into the alternative data game with the launch of its own MediaInsights, a dataset derived from over 30,000 traditional, social, and corporate media sources. MediaInsights offers earnings prediction technology by distilling consumer sentiment about retail companies. Read More

Urthecast Founder Plots a New Course

Globe and Mail

North of the border, Vancouver-based Urthecast brought us the first high definition video of earth, captured via its cameras on the ISS. Now it’s on to the next big thing in Earth Observation: connecting remote IoT devices via satellite. Read More