In the first season of Showtime’s Billions, traders at the fictional Axe Capital use satellite imagery to calculate whether Chinese factories are working overtime. 

For many people that was their first exposure to so-called alternative data, which refers to a wide-array of information Wall Street professionals use to supplement the more traditional sales and earnings figures released each quarter. 

One of the big shifts we are seeing now is that a larger group of investors are gaining easier access to alt data thanks to generative AI applications like the ones created by OpenAI. 

It’s a trend Pricing Culture, the company I co-founded with Bhargav Shivarthy, is participating in by providing clients with new content feeds. 

We are launching this week a new S&P 500 Alt Data Feed in partnership with Carbon Arc, a leading alternative data exchange. The feed provides access to a wide range of alt data from vehicle registrations numbers to credit card purchases to app downloads.

This is a big deal because such data has traditionally been hard to come by and difficult to process unless you have access to engineers or data scientists. 

The ability to access such alt data can help investors and traders peer around the corner and assess future demand for products and services. 

Moreover, by delivering the insights in a text narrative, Pricing Culture is helping unlock those insights and make them available to a much larger number of people. Currently, hedge funds tend to rely on analysts to parse the information for insights. 

The S&P 500 Alt Data Feed can be found on our website, MachineGenerated.com, and consists of hundreds of reports each month on companies in the S&P 500 Index. 

At launch, the reports include analysis of alternative datasets including Department of Motor Vehicle Registrations, Consumer Card Spending, Corporate Ad Spending, App Downloads and Web Traffic. And we are actively adding more. 

Some insights we derived from the feed over the past 12 months include:

–Demand for Cybertrucks deteriorated midyear as seen by fewer DMV registrations

–A big decline in consumer credit card spending on Royal Caribbean versus other cruise lines

–A spike in digital ad spending by Hilton Hotels in July vs ad spending by Marriott.

The S&P 500 Alt Data Feed is currently available on the Machine Generated platform as a Premium Feed for individual use. We also have enterprise pricing packages for firms in the asset management, equity research or brokerage industries. 

In the fictional Billions episode, hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod and his analyst Taylor Mason use “heat signatures” from manufacturing plants in the Pearl River Delta to determine that the Chinese factories weren’t operating at capacity. 

It’s the kind of insight that once seemed far fetched, but will be increasingly available.