Thursday 21 June 2018

Hedge funds worry about the legal risks of using “alternative” data

“QUANT” (quantitative) hedge funds, which craft elaborate algorithms to make trading decisions, rely on access to information. That used to mean market data, such as prices and trading volume. But some now seek an edge in novel sources. An industry has sprung up to serve them with, and help them analyse, “alternative” data, such as those gleaned from satellite images or by scraping websites. Many of these data firms have been founded by entrepreneurs, but some quant funds themselves are getting involved. Winton, a large London-based fund, is spinning off Hivemind, a data-analysis unit. A full-time management team was announced on June 18th.

For funds making macroeconomic bets by trading in, say, currencies or government bonds, real-time measures of inflation (scraped from e-commerce sites) or trade flows (from shipping data) can be better and more timely than the output of national statistics agencies. Funds trading in individual firms’ shares can infer information on sales from satellite...Continue reading

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