Quandl: Where to Download Financial and Economic Data – ElPropósito1 min de lectura

I wanted to build on my previous article (5 Steps to Download USDA Commodity Databases) with economic and financial information, such as commodity prices, and that’s how I came across Quandl.

This tool lets you view and download data (to Excel and other software):

• Historical commodity prices (coffee, cocoa, bananas, rubber, sugar and more)
• Prices for specific company stocks (open, high, close, volume)
• Trading volumes on stock markets (Nasdaq, FTSE, S&P 500)
• Currency and fixed-income data (bonds, interest rates, indicators)
• Alternative data, which I explain in more detail below

Not all databases on Quandl are free. Some are paid, especially the so-called "alternative data," which is meant to enrich a company’s own data with information captured outside it.

In practical terms, what is alternative data?

• Satellite images taken daily
• Geolocation data from cell phones
• Consumer transaction data from electronic receipts, among others

One practical example is predicting sales of a new product at an Apple store by crossing the store’s historical sales with alternative data from the geolocation of phones that had the feature turned on.

Another is one I read in a 2015 Bloomberg article showing how satellite image processing and algorithms predict the world’s actual oil supply more accurately. What struck me is that Quandl lets you download these databases (for a fee).

Have you ever needed this kind of data to round out your own and support your decisions? Let me know.

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Rodrigo Baccaro

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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