Generate Alpha in Australia

Alternative Data for Australian Companies: Insights and Use Cases

As economic activity comes online, new data trails are left behind. The most innovative investors leverage this data for alpha-generating insights. The following use cases illustrate how Thinknum’s alternative datasets power investment decisions across Australian companies.

Construction: Compare Hiring Over Time

Savvy investors look to hiring data as a valuable leading indicator of future corporate performance. View the number of open job listings at CIMIC Group and Downer, for example. Filter to gain in-depth competitive insights into specific market, location, and job categories.

Hiring for the two major players in the construction industry has been slow since last year. CIMIC Group and Downer have slashed job postings by 50% and 5.65% respectively in a year.

E-Commerce: Analyze Product Pricing

View the number of products listed by eCommerce platforms over time. Use this dataset as a proxy for movements in inventory. Understand the effect of cyclical and/or one-off events, like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lovisa, the online retailer for jewelry and accessories, has seen a 48% increase in their online inventory over the past 6 months.

Healthcare: Interpret Aged Care Home Locations

Display competing aged care homes across Australia in a user-friendly map. Locations are indexed from the companies’ own websites. Zoom in to take a closer look at proximity of competitor overlap.

View care homes spread around Sydney for Estia Health and Aveo, the two major players in the aged-care industry.

Foot Traffic: Compare Leaders of Australian Supermarkets

Investors leverage anonymized foot traffic data, gathered from Facebook Places, to glean insights from foot traffic over time. This can be used to measure which businesses are hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic in real time.

Woolworths vs Coles: who comes on top as customers’ superior choice? The quarterover- quarter foot traffic growth via FB checkins shows a minor decline of 1.39% and 0.35%, respectively, for the two supermarket chains.

Recreation: Trace Visits to Gym stores

Visitor numbers to Viva Leisure fitness club locations are updated in real-time on their corporate website, giving investors a leading indicator of the company’s number of visitors in real time.

Real-time traction data for Viva Leisure captured a huge drop of 95.91% in visitor count during the COVID-19 lockdown, followed by a strong rebound as health & fitness clubs reopened.

Traction: Predict the success of Job-matching Platforms

Track the number of recruiter jobs on jobseeker website seek.com, analyzing pandemic-related fluctuations in job openings.

Recruiter jobs posted on the third-party website seek.com have tanked by 70.91% since Feb 2020, and then recovered soon from the COVID-driven hiring freeze.

REIT Tenants: Analyze Commercial Real Estate

Track the tenant directories of mall REITs on a daily basis. Identify the total number of tenants for a REIT over time, or a speiciREIT’s exposure to specific tenants. Drill down to find the square footage of each individual tenant for a given REIT, or analyze aggregate vacancy rates across an entire REIT.

The bubble chart map visualizes the portfolios for Stockland, a diversified development company in Australia. The size of the bubbles represents the number of tenants under each property.

Mining: Evaluate LinkedIn Headcount

To proxy for employee headcount, use the aggregated number of LinkedIn profiles that list a company as their employer. Compare competitors’ headcount or track corporate expansion and layoffs.

LinkedIn headcount for top companies in the mining industry has increased by 5.93% YTD, with Evolution Mining leading the game with a growth rate over 15.3%.

Banking: Track App ratings for the “Big Four”

As businesses go mobile, analyze real-time user engagement data from mobile apps and social media. Rank competitors on their number of app reviews and ratings.

User ratings of ANZ’s mobile banking app have increased by 20.91% YTD, the highest increase amongst the Big Four Australian banks.

Social Media: Analyze Twitter Followers

Track social media engagement data to see what companies have an edge in marketing and communicating with their users.

The line chart above tracks the quarter-over-quarter growth in social popularity for various media channels under Nine Entertainment & Macquarie Media, including radio stations, online & local newspapers, and magazines.