Alternative data use among Chinese mutual funds
Helena Yu, Head of Asia Research (Shanghai/Taipei)
As the alternative data market grows in China, Chinese mutual funds are beginning to use alternative data to structure their fund products and explore short-term investment opportunities in the region. In this report, we give an overview of how Chinese mutual funds are currently using Chinese alternative data, focusing on individual activity data and business process data.
INDIVIDUAL ACTIVITY DATA
Examples of individual activity data include social network information, consumer product reviews, and search records – in other words, data generated by a single person. Due to the low cost of acquiring such data (e.g. web scraping), it has become one of the most widely used types of alternative data for Chinese mutual funds.
Below, we have summarized a non-exhaustive list of some of the Chinese mutual funds that are leveraging search records and consumer sentiment data to construct their fund products: