Why Evaluating Alternative Data Can Be Daunting

 

Evaluating alternative data can feel like shopping in a foreign bazaar. There’s a lack of transparency around the availability of goods, pricing feels opaque, and you don’t always know if you’re getting exactly what you need. Without exhaustive diligence, many visitors fly home with a rug in tow, only to find it doesn’t fit in their proverbial living room.

 

Firms eager to engage with alternative data understand the significant commitment required to not only gain comfort with what they’re buying, but to see if it is applicable to their investment process. The latter is almost as important as the data itself. Traditionally this required a significant amount of manpower, time, and effort, and the legwork was only fine-tuned at the most data intensive, quantitative focused firms.

 

Effortless Data Trials Through Maiden Century: No Lengthy Sales Process, Just Results

 

At MaidenCentury, we are standardizing the means of evaluating alternative data so you can seamlessly test and quickly evaluate its value proposition for your investment needs. This accelerates your time to decision and time to value creation. We want to avoid the proverbial 12-month contract where 2 months of lead-in diligence is followed by another month of integration and ramp. How do we do it? By owning all the upfront work traditionally required to perform the right type of diligence.

 

First, you can permission and trial data with the click of a button. No multi-step sales processes, no intro meetings,  and no discovery to set up a trial. Every alternative data provider wants to accelerate their time to sale, and every buyer wants to accelerate their time to insight. We provide the means for them both to do so.

 

When navigating our IDEA platform, you’ll notice hidden Vendor Rankings, representing alternative data sources which you are not licensed to access. The Maiden Century platform has already identified data feeds which represent high accuracy in the metric (e.g., MAPE) that you are backtesting, on the ticker in question. You can click the spotlight button to reveal information about the data source:

After revealing a new alternative data option outside of your existing licenses, you’ll receive a prompt allowing you to request a trial. It’s as easy as that!

Next, we’ve already gone through the effort of mapping, standardizing, cleaning, and backtesting the data. Datasets come in different file formats, periodicities, aggregation needs, and cleanliness standards. All of this represents upfront work in order to even begin testing efficacy and applicability. By cutting through all this data work, you can instantly evaluate the value the data brings across any of the 2,000 tickers we track, aligning its value proposition directly with your workflow and coverage areas.

 

Perhaps most importantly, Maiden Century’s IDEA platform also allows you to evaluate the incremental value of an alternative data signal to your existing bench of data relationships. The platform unlocks this without necessitating laborious data science tests in unwieldy excel models or in a development environment. The goal is to help you decipher if adding the incremental data source is accretive to your unique data setup and coverage area. It’s as easy as toggling a few switches to quickly A/B test efficacy across tickers you know cold. With Maiden Century, you can quickly see how the Correlation, MAPE, and MPE of numerous KPI projections change as a result of adding the dataset to your roster. What was a laborious data science exercise is now a few clicks of the mouse!

 

The end result is accelerated time to insight, streamlined trial periods. This allows you to quickly determine if new data feeds are additive to your process. Don’t enter the fog of the bazaar when looking to make a purchase. Leveraging the right technology and our team of experts at Maiden Century, can help take the ‘trials’ and tribulations out of Alternative Data trials and evaluations.

 

Contact us to learn more