Neudata has identified over 1,500 data vendors providing 5,300+ alternative datasets to the investment management community, according to an analysis of its Neudata Scout platform.

Among the datasets for which Neudata has detailed information (~1,100 datasets), web-scraped data is most popular, with 26% of datasets falling into that category. Other popular dataset types include economic (21%), event (18%), web-tracking (15%) and news (15%).*

When it comes to pricing, cheaper datasets make up the greatest proportion of products in the investment management universe. Datasets that are priced below $25k per are most popular, with 38% in that range. About 30% of data products are priced between $26k-$50k per year, which is the same for the $51k-$150k segment.

The most expensive segment of the data world (greater than $500k per year) only represents 9% of the datasets sold into the investment management world, and typically are reserved for transactional data and other datasets that are time-consuming to produce and extremely valuable to investment managers.

About 7% of datasets are free, but this segment of the market has been growing over the past year as data vendors begin to offer freemium pricing models.

One misconception in the industry is that data needs to be offered at an intra-day level in order to be valuable to investment managers. But according to analysis of data on the Neudata platform, over half of the listed datasets (55%) offer daily delivery. Monthly (36%), weekly (27%) and quarterly (17%) follow in popularity, with intra-day delivery only just cracking the top five list at 16%.

Data that is applicable to the public equity space comprises almost all (93%) of the datasets listed on the Neudata Scout platform. However, data that is applicable to private equity use-cases (67%) is also popular, with fixed-income (21%), FX (20%), commodities (19%), real estate (12%) and cryptocurrency (4%) trailing.

Alternative data users are primarily able to access providers’ data through a website (68% of listed datasets) or an API (59%). Delivery through FTP (44%), email (31%) and AWS (20%).

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*Note that this analysis includes datasets that are counted in multiple buckets within a category (because data vendors often sell data products at multiple price points, with multiple delivery mechanisms, that draw data from multiple types of sources, etc.), so total percentages be greater than 100%.