The reality of selling alt data to quant funds Almost every data provider’s pitch includes a chart that looks like this: Unfortunately, live results rarely match backtested performance. In our conversations with quant teams at both large funds and small ones, we find that promising datasets often stall on packaging, not signal quality. The quant […]
A tale of two data vendors Imagine two companies go into business selling data to hedge funds. Both analyze satellite imagery to count how many cars come to a particular Walmart each day. After the first 3 days, their databases show the following: A few days later, a customer contacts Best Data Ltd. informing them […]
1) You own your own data. Imagine migrating between competing database vendors without losing your data history. Alternatively, imagine being an Amazon reseller and keeping your sales history when you move to eBay. Blockchains allow you to store important data on neutral infrastructure, not controlled by any company. Blockchains allow your data to be validated […]
Without context, there’s no meaning To better understand a person, it’s often helpful to understand their context. What language do they speak? What city are they from? How old are they? Which schools did they attend and what did they study? Data is no different. If you don’t know where your data came from, who […]
Financial data is sometimes recorded in a bitemporal, or point-in-time, fashion, but this remains a minority practice and is not nearly as widespread as it should be. Point-in-time (PIT) data is sometimes known as snapshot data. It differs from more basic data offerings in that PIT datasets record every datapoint, event, and observation and every […]
Information asymmetry and data The data market is characterized by a significant information asymmetry between data producers and consumers. Data providers often have comprehensive insights into the origin, accuracy, completeness, and evolution of their data sets, whereas consumers must rely on providers’ representations. For financial data, in particular, the timestamps of observations and the completeness […]