Re: [Marxism] Harvesting data

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The Data Race; Fund managers are paying handsomely to sift through 
oceans of data on everything from flight patterns to parking lots for 
clues on deals and trends that move markets. Tim Shufelt looks at why 
sophisticated investors are increasingly turning to Big Data to gain an edge


The Globe and Mail (Canada), April 20, 2019 Saturday, Ontario Edition
Byline: Tim Shufelt, Staff

Last summer, a corporate jet owned by Encana Corp. embarked on a strange 
pattern of flights.


Over the course of a couple of months, the Calgary company's aircraft 
was tracked landing close to oil fields in Oklahoma, Utah and Montana. 
Encana had operations in none of those places. Houston-based Newfield 
Exploration Co., however, owned assets in all three locations.


And it turns out that Newfield's jet was also on the move around the 
same time. Its executives seemed to take a particular interest in flying 
to Denver, which happens to be home to Encana's chief executive officer, 
Doug Suttles.


The mutual visits hinted that something was in the works. And in early 
November, Encana struck the largest deal in its history when it agreed 
to buy Newfield for US$5.5-billion. An aggressive expansion into U.S. 
shale represented a dramatic change of course for the Canadian driller, 
and the deal caught the market by surprise. When trading started the 
next morning, Encana's stock plummeted by 17 per cent.


A select group of investors, however, may not have been quite so 
shocked. They had access to the movements of Encana's jet, giving them 
strong clues about what the company's executives were up to in the 
months before the acquisition.


Quandl Inc., a Toronto-based startup, allows investors to peek in on the 
travel habits of companies such as Encana. By stitching together data 
from aircraft registries, corporate filings and flight communications, 
Quandl can track the movements of thousands of corporate jets around the 
world, giving investors a new advance signal of potential marketmoving 
corporate deals.


Known as "alternative data," this kind of insight into publicly traded 
companies is proliferating, as investors and fund managers look to data 
science for an edge that will help them beat the market. Jet activity 
can foreshadow corporate deals; aggregated credit-card tallies can 
reveal consumer trends; satellite imaging can track oil inventories; 
information "scraped" from job sites can indicate who's hiring; data 
collected by auto insurers can give clues on future car-sales figures. 
The vast pools of information being generated by the digital economy 
hold the power to better predict what companies will do and how their 
stocks will perform.


The computer sophistication and machine learning needed to make sense of 
all that information, meanwhile, is quickly evolving. Until recently the 
purview of quantitative hedge funds, alternative data methods are 
spreading to mainstream investing. In December, Quandl was acquired by 
Nasdaq Inc., which runs a data products business in addition to 
operating stock exchanges. The deal amounted to an "inflection point for 
the industry," wrote Richard Johnson, a vice-president in Greenwich 
Associates' market structure and technology group.


Competition among data providers is heating up. In February, Bloomberg 
launched a site featuring 20 alternative data sets. "The race to take 
alternative data mainstream has now begun in earnest," Mr. Johnson said.


It's a race that Canadian investors have been reluctant to join.

Despite its Toronto address, Quandl has zero Canadian names on the list 
of major clients subscribing to its 50-odd data products, which range 
from estimates of Tesla sales to industrial-auction results. Outside of 
the big pension funds, in fact, it appears few Canadian investors are 
dabbling in alternative data.


There are reasons to be cautious. There is a growing discomfort over the 
capacity for Big Data analytics to observe the intimate details of 
people's lives. Meanwhile, the legalities over data collection and 
distribution can be murky, raising concerns over who owns particular 
information and who has the right to sell it. There are tough questions 
regulators are just starting to grapple with, including whether 
sophisticated investors gain an unfair advantage when they have access 
to data that is effectively unavailable to the masses.


And yet, wary Canadian investors run the risk of being left behind if 
they wait too long. Alternative data will soon be essential to 
generating competitive returns, says Tammer Kamel, Quandl's CEO. "It 
will become unacceptable to be basing your investment decisions on what 
happened

Re: [Marxism] Harvesting data

[MM via Marxism]

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> On Apr 20, 2019, at 11:22 PM, Ken Hiebert via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> This article put me in mind of bellingcat and their methods of information 
> gathering.
>   ken h
> 
> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/article-quandl-and-the-invasive-use-of-data/
>  
> 
This is behind a paywall.

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[Marxism] Harvesting data

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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This article put me in mind of bellingcat and their methods of information 
gathering.
ken h

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/article-quandl-and-the-invasive-use-of-data/
 


Everything from monitoring the thickness of the briefcase carried by the head 
of the Federal Reserve to satellite pictures of the parking lots outside big 
box stores.


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