Retail Sales Data

No can do bucko

November 29, 2023

What a past two weeks it has been - record travel, holiday sale season, there was that thing at OpenAI, and oh I started a new company. Since last post we’ve seen 5 acquisitions, 6 fundraising rounds, 18 people moves & promotions, 4 articles, 7 roles, 2 newly added events, and I’m moderating a panel!

M&A

*transactions have been announced but may not be closed

Fundraising

  • ALTR (data governance and security) raised $25M in a Series C led by John Stafford III.

  • Benchmark Mineral Intelligence (minerals & supply chain data) announced an investment from Spectrum Equity.

  • Climate Alpha (climate and location analytics) raised $5M in a Seed round led by Jungle Ventures.

  • Expanso (container orchestration and data processing) raised $7.5M in a Seed round led by General Catalyst and Hetz Ventures.

  • Jentis (data capture) raised €11M in a Series A led by Bright Pixel and 3TS Capital.

  • Scalestack (data enrichment) raised $1M in a round.

Less than two weeks to go until Neudata’s Data Summit in NY on December 7th. This is Neudata’s biggest (and final) event of the year, so you’ll want to make sure you’re there. I’ll be moderating a panel on dataset trials at 1:50pm on the Chrysler Stage.

The day will be full of networking opportunities, unlimited access to hundreds of peers & industry experts and exclusive content, including:

Dataset Trials - For Free or Not For Free, That Is The Question

  • Daniel Entrup, Author, It's Pronounced Data

  • Mark Fleming-Williams, Head of Data Sourcing, Capital Fund Management

  • Brian Peltonen, Director of Data Analytics, Fidelity Investments

  • Tim Stegner, CRO, Deception And Truth Analysis (D.A.T.A.)

US Elections: The Alternative Data Perspective

  • Charles Myers, Chairman & Founder, Signum Global Advisors

  • Drew McCoy, President, Decision Desk

  • Michael Hejtmanek, Data Intelligence Solutions, Neudata

Beyond Models – Applying Data Science/AI Effectively

  • Alfred Spector, Visiting Scholar, MIT

…And so much more! View the full agenda here.

As a subscriber to this newsletter, you can request one of the few remaining complimentary tickets for investment-side attendees.

People Moves, Promotions, and Appointments

Who’s Hiring (and the hiring manager or team leader)

Backtesting for Gross Margin Predictions & Quant Strategies

My friends at Flywheel have invested heavily in correlation analysis and modeling to provide more tangible proof points for how their dataset can be used. Below is an outline of the four levels of analysis available to research teams to replicate and evolve, in order of increasing depth and complexity:

  1. Gross Margin Insights: Correlation of Retailer Markdown & Gross Margin. Correlation analysis has been built to gauge the retailers with the highest correlation between changes in aggregate markdowns (price discounting) and company-level gross margins.

  2. KPI Analyzer: Correlating Combinations of Data points to Gross Margins. Further development of “Gross Margin Insights” has enabled the creation of “KPI Analyser” that compares any data point, or combination of data points, to company KPIs.

  3. Arb Insights: Tailored Gross Margin Model. In partnership with a new platform provider, Arb Insights, Flywheel’s data is embedded into a comprehensive gross margin model.

  4. Flywheel's Quant Strategy, Version 3. Flywheel has released a series of quant strategy white papers in 2023, each built on the learnings and progress from the prior version. The latest white paper, Version 3, was released in November 2023.

To replicate this strategy or to analyze the data on any of the tickers from the Flywheel Alternative Data eCommerce Insights coverage list, let me know if you’d like an intro to the team, or email [email protected].

What I’m reading

Upcoming Events

*new events added since last newsletter

And another for good laughs…

Views here are my own and not of my current or former employers.