CHALLENGE
A global hedge fund already had traditional hedge fund data analysis programs but wanted to leverage big data and alternative data for high-value insights and more informed investing decisions.
The firm came to Caserta with brittle, hard-to-scale legacy architecture, siloed data sources, and a lack of skilled data employees, looking for a secure, cloud-based platform that would enable the combined analysis of big data, alternative data, and its valuable traditional data for enriched results that would generate alpha.
SOLUTION
Caserta worked with the hedge fund to design and architect a scalable, secure, and gradually governed data lake on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3/Redshift cloud platform capable of handling large alternative datasets in addition to its current in-house data.
Our force multiplying consultants created a universal data source extraction process that continuously and rapidly digests any number, size, or format of data sources, converts unstructured data into machine-readable formats, and incorporates data quality checks. The extraction process powers the hedge fund’s new data system, enabling them to seamlessly test hypotheses and create and refine new investment strategies, models and algorithms. Before Caserta, analysts had to custom develop a unique process for each new data source, which was limited to known data points in unstructured data.
Using analytical notebooks that leverage PySpark and other best-in-class tools, the new datasets are prepared for analysis and fed to a visualization layer through Tableau that enables analysts and portfolio managers to visualize and interact with the data in a real-time fashion.
The hedge fund now leverages a custom alternative data platform that blends its traditional data with newly integrated alternative data in a scalable and flexible system.
BUSINESS OUTCOME
Today, analysts at the hedge fund now onboard new data in less than one hour. With access to high-powered and quickly integrated alternative data insights through its custom-made data platform, the hedge fund has completely changed how it processes and investigates data. Its investment strategies are now enhanced with next-gen insights gathered from alternative data, enabling analysts to make better-informed investment decisions.
The hedge fund is now able to quickly test new ideas, scale horizontally and vertically to address new opportunities, rapidly onboard new data, and feed its models with timely, quality datasets. Caserta’s functional and effective solution enabled the hedge fund to get to market faster than if they had completed the solution in-house.
[Alternative data] has now become a competitive space, and Caserta helped us get to market much faster than if we’d done this by ourselves. Lots of people understand big data tools, but Caserta has the ability to both architect and execute an effective solution. Not every team can do both tasks well. They came up with a great plan and efficiently executed it, building a functional and effective product.
Chief Information Officer
Leading Long/Short Quity Hedge Fund
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