How it works

"Alternative data" is any information about a company that doesn't come from the company's own financial reports. Hedge funds spend heavily on it: credit-card panels, satellite photos, app downloads. The Other Data uses only free, public, legitimately accessible sources and explains each one like you'd explain it to a friend.

1. Collect

A scheduled GitHub Actions job runs every 4 hours. It calls each source's official API or public download (with a descriptive User-Agent, polite request spacing, and respect for robots.txt), then writes the results as static files that this site reads. Nothing requires a login and nothing is scraped from behind a paywall. Sources that update monthly or quarterly (like Census retail sales or SEC filings) simply show the same numbers until the agency publishes new ones.

2. Compare

• Fast data (daily pageviews, downloads, prices): the last 28 days' average vs the 28 days before.
• Weekly data (gas prices, jobless claims, developer chatter): the last 4 weeks vs the 4 weeks before.
• Seasonal data (retail sales, carloads, FDA reports, TSA lines): this period vs the same period last year, so holidays don't fool us.
• Snapshot data (job-board counts): we save a snapshot every refresh and build the history ourselves. Until there's enough history, the card says "Tracking".

Each signal has a noise band (for example ±8% for Wikipedia views, ±2% for TSA traffic). Moves inside it are called neutral. Outside it, the move is a tailwind or headwind depending on how that data has typically related to the company (rising jet fuel is bad for an airline, rising oil is good for an oil producer). Some signals cut both ways, so we label them context.

3. Explain

Every signal card answers three questions: what the data is, why it might matter for this company, and what it's showing now. The "showing now" text is generated from the actual numbers by a template. An optional AI summary (Gemini) can be switched on with an API key; it is only allowed to restate the computed facts and is rejected if it sounds like investment advice.

Honesty rules

• No made-up numbers. If a source fails, the card says "Data unavailable", or shows the last good data with a clear "stale" warning and the time it was fetched.
• Ideas without a live data source (like moth counts or recycling volumes) are labeled "Idea · not live".
• Stock prices only appear when a licensed price feed (Finnhub for quotes, Tiingo for end-of-day history) is connected. We don't scrape prices from sites that disallow it. Otherwise each stock page links out to a price chart.
• Correlation isn't causation. Public data is often already priced in by the time it's published.

Sources and live health

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Every signal

Not financial advice

The Other Data is an educational project. It shows public statistics and explains common ways people interpret them. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Do your own research or talk to a licensed professional.