Asia investors increasingly seeking unorthodox data sources in battle to beat benchmarks

Hong Kong

SOMETIME in the third quarter of 2016, Blackrock's scientific active equity team, which manages US$80 billion globally, began picking up increased signs of construction activity on the ground in China by using satellite imagery.

Using that as a starting point and adding freight traffic and other data to the picture, the US-based analysts determined that the world's second-biggest economy was on the verge of a cyclical rebound.