About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

RavenPack Report Lists 12 Use-Cases for Alt-Data-Driven Analytics

Subscribe to our newsletter

Analytics provider RavenPack has identified a dozen use-cases for traders seeking to profit from alternative data. In a new report – ‘12 Validated New Ways to Capture Alpha with Alternative Data’ – the company demonstrate how news analytics provides original sources of alpha not already factored in by existing indicators and models.

The report – a compilation of research studies published by the company’s in-house data science team and independent researchers – covers a number of use cases. These include trading strategies based upon ESG-sensitive news headlines, changes to earnings release dates, company insider transaction news, and novel ways of using news analytics to forecast geopolitical events such as the Covid-19 pandemic and US election results.

According to Chief Data Scientist Peter Hafez, an increasing number of firms are now looking at how to apply natural language processing (NLP) to news content in order to uncover trading signals. “A lot of firms today are tapping into news content in a systematic way”, he says. “News moves markets. There is a fundamental link between whatever happens in the news and potential decision making.”

Although the most sophisticated quantitative hedge funds have been using these methods since the early 2000s, says Hafez, momentum is now building across a much wider user base. “In addition to quantitative asset managers, quantamental and fundamental investors are now looking at news content, sentiment data, and event data as well,” he says. “And it’s use is expanding from equities to multi-asset.”

Although the twelve studies in the report are wide-ranging, two of them deal specifically with the impact of the COVID pandemic. And in March last year the company launched a free Coronavirus News Monitor, to track news about the virus and monitor related sentiment indicators, including a Panic Index and a Media Hype Index.

“What Coronavirus has shown is how powerful it is to have alternative data available in front of you, as part of what we refer to as a Data Mosaic,” says Hafez. “For example, the Panic Index was a key driver of equities markets globally, beyond what could have been captured from confirmed cases.”

The company now plans to greatly extend its data coverage. “Today we track about 300,000 entities, but that will increase into millions of entities,” says Hafez.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Strategies and solutions for unlocking value from unstructured data

Unstructured data accounts for a growing proportion of the information that capital markets participants are using in their day-to-day operations. Technology – especially generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) – is enabling organisations to prise crucial insights from sources – such as social media posts, news articles and sustainability and company reports – that were all but...

BLOG

Finastra to Divest Treasury and Capital Markets Business to Apax Funds

Finastra has agreed to sell its Treasury and Capital Markets (TCM) business to an affiliate of Apax Partners LLP, the private equity advisory firm. The transaction, expected to close in the first half of 2026, will see TCM operate as an independent, rebranded entity under Apax ownership. The TCM division, which serves over 340 financial...

EVENT

RegTech Summit London

Now in its 9th year, the RegTech Summit in London will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the European capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...