Firms hone use of new data to pick Covid-19’s winners

Managers are using alternative data to assess the pandemic’s effect on individual stocks

The Covid-19 outbreak has accelerated the use of alternative data in investing. The first stage of its use saw firms apply alternative data mostly in macroeconomic forecasting or to assess the impact of the pandemic at sector level. Increasingly, though, as investors refine their use of the data, they are searching out indicators that tell them about the prospects for individual companies.

PanAgora Asset Management is using natural language processing to gather and process data on Covid-19