Price data is table stakes: everyone has it, so it is hard to build a durable edge on it alone. Alternative data — signals generated as a side effect of the real economy rather than by a trading venue — is where a lot of that edge has migrated. Three sets are worth understanding because they behave very differently from a price feed.
Shipping lanes: the physical economy, live
Vessel positions, port congestion and cargo flows are a near-real-time read on physical trade. A pile-up of tankers off a loading terminal, a shift in container routing, a slowdown at a major port — these move ahead of the shipping, energy and retail numbers that eventually report them. Full shipping-lane data lets a desk see the supply chain as it happens rather than reading about it a quarter later.
Social maps: attention before it prints
Social sentiment is noisy, but structured well it is a map of where attention is concentrating and how fast. The value is rarely the raw polarity score; it is the acceleration — a name going from quiet to loud, a sector lighting up before the tape reacts. Treated as a map rather than a single number, it is an early-warning layer over everything else you watch.
Company DNA: exposure, not tickers
Markets trade tickers, but risk lives in relationships. Company DNA is a graph of how firms actually connect — suppliers, customers, subsidiaries, competitors. When one name moves, the graph tells you who else is exposed, often before the correlation shows up in prices. It turns "what do I own" into "what am I actually exposed to."
One key, one schema
The usual problem with alt-data is integration: every set arrives from a different vendor in a different shape, and half the project is plumbing. Pig Data ships shipping lanes, social maps, company DNA, news and elections behind the same API key and symbology as the price feeds — so alt-data becomes another query, not another vendor.