Alternative Market Data

[adam99]

I am reading about alternative market data.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/matei...ata-quantamental-hedge-funds2016-12?r=US&IR=T

There are several news articles about consumer transaction data, but I am wondering if anyone actually has designed any algo using this sort of data.

Is there any sample data out there, or are there any vendors that might provide sample sets to check if it can be used with a trading algo or not

 

[HeSaidSheSaid]

have you tried google and yahoo finance websites (you could download stock prices down to second)

 

[just21]

https://www.quandl.com/alternative-data free trials available.

 

[adam99]

have you tried google and yahoo finance websites (you could download stock prices down to second)

Alternative data is not about stock prices. It is about market trends that could impact earnings for example. You can try to estimate the earnings release from the sales data from credit card transactions before it is announced. Large differences can result in big gains

 

[Butterfly]

I found quite a few with different quality of data, tough job

 

[rookresearch]

There's a ton of alt data that can be grabbed if you're creative with web scraping.

Really old method is any retailer with sequential order id #s. Consistently place an order on the 1st of each month (or qtr) and calculate the delta of orders placed. Of course pretty much all the hedge funds have been doing this for years.

Another example using ZNGA is tracking 'currently online' player counts they show in their apps and website. Scrape the number at exact same times everyday and track their player activity real-time.

Their poker #s looked like this, which did predict the drop in activity of Poker on the 10-q:
(ignore the 0s, my script broke for a bit and didn't realize it)