In the world of finance, it is crucial to understand trends in the stock market and stock performance in order to maximize return on investment.
To better understand these trends, investors must study traditional market data, such as pricing, as well as data provided by untraditional sources known as alternative data.
Alternative data provides a larger volume of information to analyze which helps investors improve their predictions.
This may include credit card transaction data, mobile device data, Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data, product reviews, weather data, web traffic and app usage data.
This article goes over the idea of alternative data and lists down the top seven alternative data providing platforms, their features, pros, cons, and pricing to help pick the best platform for you!
What are Alternative Data Providers
Since alternative data is dynamic (updating every instant) and does not come from traditional sources, financial investors may find it difficult to track down and acquire this data.
Understanding these difficulties, a number of companies have been established that provide the necessary tools and platforms to acquire and even analyze alternative data.
The number of companies that provide this service has grown significantly in recent years.
Top 7 Alternative Data Providing Platforms
1. Thinknum
About
Thinknum is the world’s leading provider of alternative data insights. This web platform allows investors to get data-driven investment ideas by monitoring the websites of over five hundred thousand public and private companies around the world daily.
Thinknum’s advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms analyze company data in real-time, tracking job listings, headcounts, social media tractions, employee sentiments, product pricing and store locations to create more than 35 structured datasets available on their platform.
Features
- Tracks strategic movements within companies, including available positions and moving products
- Includes metrics for evaluating company performance
- Provides a user-friendly software platform that helps quickly derive insights without hassle
- Users can build and share queries in a matter of minutes using intuitive tools provided by the platform
- Provides data visualization features for quick insights including pre-configured maps, charts and word clouds
- The platform allows users to set up alerts that work by scanning data points across millions of companies and receiving emails when relevant metrics cross-critical thresholds
- The platform also includes widgets that include existing maps, charts, word clouds, and other visualizations. Users can also design custom widgets, that view data the way they want
Pros
- Users can explore datasets from over five hundred thousand different companies
- User-friendly software platform that allows users to create queries quickly without having to wait for engineer guidance
- The alerts feature allows for customers to set up alerts to ensure that they are the first to know when certain data points change
- The company indexes its real-time data trails using advanced machine-learning techniques to offer directly actionable data insights
- A number of innovative corporations, investment firms and universities make use of Thinknum Alternative Data
Cons
- Thinknum targets large companies or firms and so pays very little attention to nascent companies or startups
- The customer support service medium does not include 24/7 representative, phone call, or FAQ services. Rather is limited to email.
- Provides only one pricing option with no alternative payment plans.
Pricing
Thinknum charges $16800.00 per year for product usage under the ‘flat rate’ pricing model. They do not provide a free version but do offer a free-trial demo version. You can check out the demo version here.
2. Yewno Edge
About
The Yewno alternative data solution focuses on creating fully comprehensive knowledge graphs for hedge funds and asset managers.
These graphs help draw connections between data points in various unique environments.
The company collects information from public data and events, which is then passed through their artificial intelligence to enable financial professionals with actionable insights on topics like ESG, Patent Analytics, distinct alpha signals, and many more.
Using Yewno’s ‘Edge’ platform, companies can access many valuable, AI-augmented products and solutions, including alternative data packages, APIs and index strategies.
Features
- Provides a sentiment score as a reliable performance metric for historic data and events
- Uses AI-Powered Alpha signals to uncover trading opportunities on a daily basis
- Provides a watchlist feature that enables you to monitor the price, changes, ranges and sentiment of any stock
- The platform provides strategy-building features including allowing users to quickly run feasibility studies on investment ideas
- Technical analysis features enable users to identify trading opportunities in price trends
- Provides and AI-powered news feed that includes relevant news and links to original documentation that highlights investment opportunities
- The concept exposure feature enables users to search for a specific stock and see what concept terms it is most associated with. For example, ‘Apple’ is associated with terms like ‘iPhone,’ ‘laptop,’ and ‘M1 Pro’.
- Provides company profiles that let users dive deeper and explore a company’s fundamental data. It also provides a graph showing the top five suppliers and top five customers of the company
Pros
- Provides valuable insights into company profiles and industries from millions of documents
- Includes advanced AI features that analyze huge amounts of data in a matter of minutes!
- Quickly compiles data sentiments from millions of data points
- The AI-powered newsfeed provides a user-customized feed of relevant information, avoiding information overload
- Search for companies by concept, product, or technology
Cons
- No mobile option is currently available
- The platform is considered more costly as compared to other similar service providers
- The platform can be quite slow to load data
Pricing
Yewno offers three payment plans with varying usage and features.
Users have to pay $59 per user per month or can access a 14-day free trial version here, for Basic features including:
- Watchlist
- Top Movers
-
General News
-
Company Profile
-
Advanced Charting
-
Technical Analysis
Users have to pay $149 per user per month or can access a 14-day free trial version here, for Premium features. These include all Basic features and a number of additional features including:
- Strategy Builder
- Stock Screener
- Key Developments
- Portfolio Exposure
- Concept Exposure
- Country Exposure
- Patent Exposure
- Data Packages
- Fundamental Analysis
- Official Filings
Users have to contact Yenwo to acquire the Professional features payment plan. This can be done here. This includes all Basic and Premium features along with a few add-ons including:
- Document Search
- Knowledge Graph
3. Quiver Quantitative
About
Quiver Quantitative is an alternative data providing platform that offers professionals the tools they need to make better decisions by scraping alternative stock data from across the internet and aggregating it into a free, easy-to-use web dashboard.
The site includes well-organized data sets that go over corporate lobbying, work visas, government contracts, Wikipedia views and much more.
Features
- Includes a variety of datasets including senate trading, house trading, Wikipedia page views and Government Contracts
- Advanced AI that processes billions of data points to create dozens of actionable metrics
- Utilizes features of Big Data to gain an edge over the market
- Users can leverage the platform to sell their own alternative data for any stock that they are interested in
Pros
- The Senate and House trading options enable users to learn which U.S. legislators have purchased or sold shares of a particular stock
- Users can view the number of shares bought and sold by people within a given company
- The platform is available for desktop as well as mobile devices
Cons
- The mobile application has been reported as being buggy
Pricing
The Quiver Quantitative platform is free to use and available here.
4. S&P Global
About
S&P Global is a well-known innovator in market intelligence, providing an institutional source of alternative data designed for professional investors and hedge fund managers. S&P Global provides users with insights into a range of tools to help drive trading decisions.
The corporation makes extensive use of AI innovations that incorporate data from decades of training into insights.
Features
- S&P Global’s alternative data solution includes shopping mall statistics, traffic deviations, information on satellite images, and commodity movements
- Includes an interactive product finder to discover relevant datasets and solutions depending on a user’s preference
Pros
- Provides robust data solutions and flexible distribution channels
- Flexible technology to enhance proprietary analytics and discover patterns unique user preferences
Cons
- Company oriented platform and pricing make it unsuitable for individual users
Pricing
S&P Global charges $5,000.00 per company per year in the form of a subscription. You can check out the demo version here.
5. AlphaSense
About
AlphaSense is an alternative data provider that provides an advanced AI-powered search and data discovery experience to investors and innovators alike.
Using this platform, users can gain access to a host of premium business data sources, broker research, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, and trade/news journals.
More than 1,600 companies and financial institutions currently use AlphaSense to collect data for strategic decision-making requirements.
Features
- Provides over 10,000 premium business data sources, including broker research, transcripts, SEC filings, news and trade journals
- Users will also have access to NLP and AI search technology to find the data points most relevant to their use
- The platform allows for streamlining research workflows with annotation, modeling, and sharing capabilities
- Capable of recognizing millions of financial terms and their synonyms
Pros
- Research platform allows users to monitor competitors and peers using AI-powered smart alerts
- Annotations, clipping, and research sharing capabilities help save time and maximize efficiency
Cons
- Prices not listed on the website
- Lack of customer support
Pricing
Pricing for this platform is available upon request. You can request the full version here or make use of the 2-week demo version here.
6. Kantar
About
Kantar provides financial experts and companies the opportunity to get a full picture of market dynamics across a range of different sectors.
This dedicated environment for alternative data and discovery allows its users to stay ahead of the competition with informative insights into markets of their choice.
Features
- The platform includes extensive benchmarking features to compare company performance with that of competitors
- Supports mobile survey feature
- Includes reporting, analytics and statistical analysis
- Provides users with a survey builder and survey sample management options
- The platform supports audio, image and even video data
Pros
- Allows companies to build macro-level reporting custom-made to their needs with 24-hour updates, meaning consistent dataflow
- Provides support for information on a huge range of channels, and retail performance information from more than 100,000 shoppers
Cons
- The platform is difficult to use and not very user friendly
Pricing
Provides a 12-month subscription for a price of $995.00; you can avail of this here. Kantar also provides a demo version that you can request here.
7. Quandl
About
Quandl offers specialized data analysis and aggregation, offering businesses and financial individuals access to a wide selection of exclusive private company insights. These include automobile sales estimates, hiring statistics, manufacturing reports, and business spending patterns.
Quandl gathers, evaluates, and productizes data assets that are valuable to financial investors and allows its users to work with a dedicated sales team to determine the type of data insights that will drive the best investment opportunities.
Features
- The platform offers an enormous collection of over 20 million datasets that are updated on a weekly basis
- The platform includes features that breakdown and preprocesses data from given datasets
- The platform allows users to sell their own data as well
Pros
- All datasets are available for instant download in any preferred format
- All datasets on Quandl are available through the same API, irrespective of who originally published the data or in what format
- All datasets are easy to find, work with, open and transparent
- Quandl is compatible with many programs including Excel, Python, R, Ruby and MATLAB
- Some parts of Quandl are free and open to everyone
Cons
- Many of the more exotic datasets are not free
- Quandl offers limited amounts of help when constructing analyses or discovering information
- The platform does not include real-time or delayed stock price data
- The platform does not include a master security list
Pricing
Quandl offers both free and premium products.
The Quandl API is free to use and grants access to all free datasets.
Quandl users have to pay to access Quandl’s premium data products and the pricing ranges from $35,000 to $250,000 per year depending on the dataset subscription you wish to acquire. You can get the subscription here.
Conclusion
You should now have a good idea about the significance of alternative data in financial investment, along with some insight on the leading alternative data providers, their platforms, features and different services.
All the mentioned platforms are equipped with cutting-edge data analytics and AI features to provide better and more feasible investment opportunities for a new generation of investment companies, firms and individuals.
If you’ve tried any of these alternative data providers, let us know about your experience in the comments.
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