Various estimates based on alternative data are becoming increasingly popular in financial markets. It is, however, unclear how good these estimates can be when it comes to forecasting large-scale, macroeconomic data. This is because unlike private entities, governments have the infrastructure to acquire information spanning entire populations, making them a unique source of macro data.

In this sam...

Please join Prof. Abhiroop Mukherjee, Liwei Huang Associate Professor of Business at HKUST and teaching faculty of the MSGF program, Prof. Bruno Solnik, Emeritus Professor of Finance at HKUST, and Fabrice Schloegel as they discuss the use of alternative data to forecast macro-economics news.

The investment community relies on low frequency lagged government data to learn about key economic indicato...

Please join Prof. Alminas Žaldokas, Associate Professor of Finance at HKUST and teaching faculty of the MSGF program, Prof. Bruno Solnik, Emeritus Professor of Finance at HKUST, and Fabrice Schloegel as they discuss the impact of TV advertising on retail investor’s trading behaviour.

By analysing minute-by-minute US TV advertising data covering some 300 firms, 326,000 ads, and $20 billion in ad spe...

On March 2, 2020, Nikola, an electric vehicle start-up, announced that it will pursue a listing on NASDAQ through a merger with VectoIQ Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and sports gambling company DraftKings have also gone public via SPACs. Bill Ackman has raised a $4bn SPAC to invest in a “mature unicorn”. While SPACs have been popu...