What on Earth is “quantamental” investing, and why is everyone talking about it? My deep dive into the hottest fad in asset management. on.ft.com/2SeIs5G 
Here are some concrete examples, courtesy of an interesting Neuberger Berman report. Some people thought Amazon selling own-brand batteries would wreck Duracell, Energizer and Panasonic battery sales, but Amazon's own data shows that hasn't happened.
Glassdoor ratings are another interesting dataset I know a lot pf people are now mining. This chart shows how P&G employees HATED the 2016 reorg, but changes since 2018 (spurred by activist Nelson Peltz) seems to have encouraged renewed optimism.
With Natural Language Processing you can parse earnings calls and see what phrases are historically positive or negative (an AT&T example below). Some are obvious, but more surprisingly, "very optimistic" is actually a negative signal.
Lots of interesting nuances that emerge. For example,
“closer look,” “briefly review” or “quick update” may seem neutral, but the first tends to be positive and the other two negative - management likes to get into details that reflect well on them, but skirt over problems.
“closer look,” “briefly review” or “quick update” may seem neutral, but the first tends to be positive and the other two negative - management likes to get into details that reflect well on them, but skirt over problems.
Using credit card data, Neuberger Berman was able to see that Starbucks' loyalty programme was working in lifting ARPUs, and therefore use the loyalty programme data as a leading indicator of Starbucks revenues.
Granular credit card data also let NB examine the impact of the first 839 “Experience of the Future” restaurants McDonalds remodelled in late 2017. They found that while average spend growth slowed slightly, they more than made up for it with much higher traffic.
When examining the Lyft and Uber IPOs, NB looked at how many drivers were switching company or driving both, and the overall decline in new customers, making them worried that they will become dependent on existing customers using the ride-sharing apps more.
