Alternative data guides
Practical primers for sourcing, evaluating and using alternative data
What is alternative data?
Alternative data in investment research: what the term covers, how it differs from data format, and why provenance, timing, access and validation matter. Concept· Updated 2026-09-07How funds evaluate alternative data vendors
Evaluating alternative-data providers: research fit, provenance, historical timing, permitted use and the evidence needed for an informed purchasing decision. Guide· Updated 2026-09-08Job postings as an investment signal
Why hiring data predicts fundamentals: growth intent, expansion geography, technology adoption and cost control, how postings are collected, structured and turned into tradeable indicators. Guide· Updated 2026-08-25Card transaction panels
How anonymized card panels turn payment flows into revenue estimates: panel construction, debiasing, aggregation lags, and the gap between what panels see and what companies report. Guide· Updated 2026-08-25Alt data delivery formats and pipelines
API, S3, Snowflake, Parquet, webhooks: how datasets are actually delivered, what each format costs operationally, and how to design ingestion that survives schema drift and vendor quirks. Guide· Updated 2026-08-25Open vs commercial alternative data
What free and open datasets can and cannot do: where public data rivals paid panels, where it cannot compete, and how open sources fit a professional research workflow. Guide· Updated 2026-08-25Web scraping and compliance in alternative data
How scraped datasets are actually collected, where terms of service and computer-muse laws draw lines, what hiQ v. LinkedIn settled and did not, and the diligence checklist for legally fragile data. Guide· Updated 2026-08-25Satellite and geospatial signals
Counting the world from orbit: optical imagery, SAR, aerial and drone data as investment signals, what each can see, revisit-tradeoffs, and how raw pixels become tradeable indicators. Guide· Updated 2026-08-25News and sentiment analytics
Turning text into tradable signal: NLP pipelines behind news sentiment scores, entity resolution, event extraction, latency economics, and why most sentiment alpha lives in the details. Guide· Updated 2026-08-25Alternative data for hedge funds
A practical guide to alternative data for hedge funds: team design, budget sequencing, infrastructure, vendor portfolio construction and the metrics that show whether the program creates investment value. Guide· Updated 2026-08-25Free alternative data sources
The practical list of free alternative-data sources for investors: public filings, official statistics, satellite and earth observation, on-chain data, web archives and open registries, what each covers, what it costs in engineering effort, and where free data falls short. Guide· Updated 2026-08-30Alternative data for investing
How funds turn alternative data into an investment edge: signal families, evaluation, backtesting, compliance and the build-vs-buy decision, mapped to the datasets and providers indexed on this encyclopedia. Guide· Updated 2026-08-31Job market data: datasets and providers
The datasets and providers behind labor-market signals: job postings, payroll, employee profiles and job-change data, what each source measures, its caveats and how to choose one. Guide· Updated 2026-08-31State of Alternative Data 2026
A data-driven snapshot of the AltData.wiki catalog: dataset sources, signal categories, provider geographies, delivery methods, pricing bands and metadata quality. Guide· Updated 2026-09-02 