In the fiercely competitive world of hedge funds, new alternative data sources are a key ingredient in the never-ending search for alpha. While Consumer Edge’s transaction data and Similarweb’s web and app tracking data are perennial favourites, unearthing less crowded data sources can deliver an important edge.

• New datasets can serve several purposes:
• Fill a gap in the data market
• Offer more reasonable pricing
• Provide a new source of data

In this intelligence piece, we highlight datasets that have historically been sold to corporates, brands or advertising agencies, or are being offered by data owners looking to monetise proprietary data collected for internal use.

Buyer beware

While new datasets and vendors are constantly coming to market, it must be noted that many of the vendors listed are inexperienced in dealing with the investment management vertical and these datasets are relatively untested. We believe these data products may require more sophisticated investors with data science capabilities and a willingness to hand-hold vendors. In some cases, history may be lacking or the data may not be mapped to tickers.

In this report, we look at new datasets in:

• Industrials
• Transactions
• Healthcare