Alternative data (finance)

An alternative data set can be compiled from various sources such as financial transactions, sensors, mobile devices, satellites, public records, and the internet.

The field is still in the early phases of development, yet depending on the resources and risk tolerance of a fund, multiple approaches abound to participate in this new paradigm.

Such a standard should address personally identifiable information (PII) obfuscation and access scheme requirements among other issues.

Compliance professionals and decision makers can benefit from proactively creating internal guidelines for data operations.

With 4 billion webpages and 1.2 million terabytes of data on the internet, there is a mountain of information that can be valuable to investors when analyzing a corporate performance.

In some cases web scraping requires use of public APIs as a way to access the data within those pages directly without visiting the actual website.

It also includes key protections for managers in areas such as prevention of insider trading and 'right to use data'.