Alternative Data

Alternative data is any observation about a business that does not come from its financial statements. It is attractive because it is timely and unattractive because it is almost always a proxy for the thing you actually want to know.

Surfaces#

Why the proxy relationship matters#

A drop in job postings can mean a hiring freeze, a completed hiring round, a shift to contractors, a change in how postings are syndicated, or an artefact of the collector missing a source. The observation is the same in all five cases. Pimsy therefore reports the observation and the set of explanations consistent with it, and treats any single-explanation reading as a finding that requires corroboration.

• Coverage changes look like signal — a collector adding or losing a source produces a step change that resembles a real one. Coverage metadata is reported alongside every series.
• Survivorship — entities that stop being observable frequently disappear from the panel rather than being recorded as departed.
• Reflexivity — once a signal is widely tracked, the observed party has an incentive to manage it.
• Short history — most alternative datasets have too few cycles to establish whether a relationship is stable or coincidental.