The Alternative Data Podcast

In this emergency two-part episode around the ongoing Suez Canal event I speak to two alternative data providers that are perfectly positioned to provide insight to investors.First up, I speak to Stellios Stratidakis of MarineTraffic, a company that maps the data provided via the transponders aboard all the ships afloat at any given time. Along with the historical data and additional intelligence it layers on top, MarineTraffic should be the first port of call for anyone seeking to understand the situation on the water.In the second part I speak to Philippe Pagnotta of Shipfix, a data provider more focused on the order and pricing data related to the shipping markets, with a particular focus on the dry sector. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I’m joined by Doug McElhaney and Mohammed Aaser of McKinsey. Doug and Mohammed recently co-authored a paper about external data - a word for alternative data used by corporates. In our conversation Doug, Mohammed and I discuss the differences between external and alternative data, how McKinsey’s clients extract value from external data and challenges in risk management around using external data. Doug and Mohammed also supply advice to alternative data providers around how to make their offering more attractive to corporate clients. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I speak to John Farrall of 90 West Data. After a successful career in sell-side research John and a colleague gained access to a differentiated US consumer transactions dataset, and 90 West data is the resulting company.In our conversation John and I spoke about challenges involved in selling alternative data, the tailwinds behind growth in the alternative data ecosystem, the expansion of alt data into corporate client usage and likely consolidation in the sector. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I speak to JP Gravitt, who until January was Director of Research at 7Park Data, an alternative data company which has now ceased to exist. In our conversation, JP and I spoke about the challenges of selling alternative data, the education process needed when dealing with different clients ranging from hedge funds into the corporate world, what happened at 7Park Data, the possible future direction of travel for the alternative data sector and the evolving types of jobs that are opening up in the sector. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I speak to Philip Brittan of Crux Informatics.Rather than being an alternative data buyer or provider, Crux is a utility designed to serve the wider data market. Billing itself as ‘the DHL of data’, Crux provides a pipeline which streamlines the complicated and unwieldy process of transporting data from the provider to the consumer.Philip’s own background in the upper echelons of Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg showed him the problems that he is now dedicated to solving.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I speak to Peter Hafez of RavenPack.  Dating back to the early ‘00s, RavenPack is one of the pioneers of alternative data, since it was using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract meaning from textual data long before it became fashionable.Peter’s position of Chief Data Scientist allowed us to get a little more technical in our discussion of RavenPack’s offering. (Note: reposted following edit from Ravenpack to RavenPack) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I speak to Garrett Long of LeapYear, a California-based company that has a claim to having solved the data privacy problem.LeapYear’s software is able to give peace of mind to owners of large datasets by ensuring they cannot be reverse engineered to reveal, for example, the personal data of individuals.  This means companies are able to release the full value in their data by selling it to investors as alternative data, among other things. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I speak to Philip Beck of Moojing, a China-based e-commerce data provider.As an established player with 6 years in the Chinese market, Moojing is in a strong position to take advantage of the growing alternative data interest in China. We talk about advertising to Chinese consumers, the e-commerce scene in China, and what market trends Philip has been seeing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I speak to Philipp Aeby of RepRisk. Switzerland-based RepRisk is one of the founding fathers of the trending ESG sector, since it has been compiling environmental and social data since the mid-2000s, and kept up to date with the latest machine learning techniques used for generating it.In our conversation, Philipp and I discuss his unusual background as a debut novelist, how ESG came to be quite so hot right now, and frontiers for the sector notably in the Chinese market.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, international news was full of a story in which a group of independent investors collaborated via the web-based chat forum Reddit to go up against Wall Street hedge funds and win, specifically by buying options and shares in GameStop, a stock that the hedge funds had sold short. Though the event was swiftly politicized into a David and Goliath story, perhaps the more interesting suggestion is that the markets might be faced with a new type of player, a co-ordinated mass of small investors not necessarily motivated only by profit.In this emergency episode I speak to Sylvain Forté of SESAMm, an alternative data company that has been automatically monitoring forums like Reddit for many years, and which might provide assistance to traditional investors in understanding and coping with this new market influence.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.