Topic
Sourcing and compliance
How data is sourced, and what a due diligence review asks of a vendor.
- How to evaluate a company data vendor in ten questionsTen questions for any vendor of company data, from coverage to change management, each with a document to request and a test to run on a sample. Our own answers are included, each with the public document behind it.
- Why we read job postings from the company's own boardA job posting can be read where the employer published it or where it was copied to. The source decides how many records a role produces, whose role it is and what its dates mean.
- Alternative data due diligence questionnaires, question by questionThe FISD questionnaire topic by topic, with the evidence each question calls for, and how Neudata and Eagle Alpha handle questionnaires once vendors have answered them.
- What alternative data scouts look for in a new datasetWhat Neudata and Eagle Alpha publish about how funds judge a new dataset, set beside five checks you can run on a company-level dataset, with the Fokals tables as the example.
- Building crawlers vs licensing company dataA crawler framework fetches pages, and company data needs more work after the fetch. What building takes, what a licence delivers in its place, and how the two combine.
- Alternatives to building your own company data crawlersFour routes to rows of company data from the web: your own crawler, a managed scraping service, open datasets or a licensed feed. What each takes off your hands, and what stays with you.
- Data provenanceData provenance records where data came from, when it was observed and what was done to it. What a record should hold, and how source, observation time and label version appear in Fokals tables.
- Due diligence questionnaire (DDQ)The questionnaire a buyer sends a data vendor to check sourcing, rights, personal data and MNPI. What it asks, which standard forms exist and how to answer with documents.
- First-party dataFirst-party data is what an organisation collects directly from its own customers and operations. Two senses of the term, and why the second matters in due diligence on a data vendor.
- LEIThe 20-character code for a legal entity such as a company or fund. What a record holds, how the check digits work and how an LEI maps to the securities it issues.
- Material non-public information (MNPI)Information that a reasonable investor would find important and that has not been released. The two tests, the questions a fund asks of a data source and common mistakes.
- robots.txtrobots.txt is the file at the root of a website that tells crawlers which paths to avoid. How its rules are matched, what happens when it is missing, and why it is not security.
- Third-party dataThird-party data is information collected by someone else and supplied to you under licence. What to ask a supplier before you rely on it, and how company-level data differs from audience data.
- Web crawlerA web crawler visits pages automatically and records what it reads. How crawlers work, how they differ from scrapers and what separates responsible conduct from harmful.