Using hiring activity data as a signal for future business growth is the most common investment use case for aggregating online job postings. But do other use cases exist for this type of data? For example, can it tell us a) how effective companies are at hiring highly demanded skills, b) whether any of their facilities have suspended operations or even c) a clearer picture of the economic activity in opaque markets? In this piece, we review the landscape of vendors providing job market data, outline possible use cases and discuss its limitations.

With great power comes great responsibility – or not? According to one academic paper, firm-level electricity consumption data provides a novel window into financial misreporting among South Korean firms. We discuss how an investor can take this use case from theory to practice with a number of alternative indicators for firm productivity.

Now Uber and Lyft have both gone public, we take a look at some of the alternative data captured on these companies. There are various sources of insight into performance and prospects for rideshare companies, spanning a number of dataset types. In this piece, we highlight insights derived from ESG and transactional datasets.

It has been nearly six months since we last discussed Net Promoter Scores (NPS) in one of our Intelligence reports - our report initially made the case against NPS. Despite refuting the controversial customer loyalty metric as a leading financial indicator, we at Neudata still continue to receive interest from a significant number of institutional investors for NPS datasets. In response, we revisit the topic and discuss a 2018 academic paper that investigated whether NPS could be predictive of consumer spending and company revenue.

Investors may want to pay more attention to intangible assets. As a percentage of total assets on S&P 500 constituents’ balance sheets, intangibles have risen from 17% in 1975 to over 84% today. Many datasets that measure intangibles are relatively unknown and under-utilized – perhaps offering a degree of edge to some investors. In this report we outline where to find alternative data sources that measure 3 types of intangibles: 1) brand value, 2) human capital and 3) intellectual property.

Sentiment can be found in places other than text-based language. We introduce an academic paper that correlates market sentiment with news article photos and consider whether or not multimodal sentiment analysis (derived from audio, images, video) has a future in the landscape of alternative data.

Drug development pipelines are the foundation on which pharma and biotech companies build their future success. Consequently, share price volatility is commonplace around the announcement of clinical trial results. In this report, we expand on our previous work - Using Alt Data to Evaluate Pharma Pipelines – by exploring a) the impact of clinical trial outcomes on the market value of pharma and biotech companies and b) predictive factors that could be used to estimate clinical trial outcomes.

2019 marks the start of the next generation of communication: 5G. While the US and China rollout the technology using existing 4G networks and infrastructure, we look forward to 2025 - when 5G is expected to be operating without any reliance on its predecessor. In this Intelligence report, we use alternative data to try to answer 1) which telco operators are likely to dominate the market six years from now, and 2) how much they stand to earn with their innovations.