Today, Thursday 12th March 2020, FTSE100 closed with a 10% negative percentage move. This is the largest decline since the Black Monday in 1987. S&P500 Index and many other indices around the world are also experiencing very large declines with many falling over 20% since the start over the year, entering the "bear market". At present, it is hard to predict the impact of Coronavirus on the performance of many businesses. This lack of understanding and great uncertainty has resulted in large sell-offs by investors. Are these actions based on fundamentals or just herd behaviour?

A well known quote comes to mind: “In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”

Instead of using share prices, as an indication of a companies' future success, or waiting months for their new financial reports, investors should seek to find sources of data that they can begin to collect and analyse immediately. Such information can expose the sudden changes in key factors that drive a business and allows one to logically conclude what the potential consequences or risks might be.

This does not necessary imply you want to use this information to buy or sell shares. Gathering alternative data points can help each business to better understand how Coronavirus can impact key stakeholders in its business: employees, customers, suppliers, capital providers and so on.

Consumer Awareness of Coronavirus

Using information from Twitter, historic and live data can be collected alongside the location origin of tweets, mentioning Coronavirus. This provides an insight into how much awareness consumers have in different locations. Combining NLP techniques and public statistics on the spread of the virus, the impact of this illness in the area can be predicted. This information forecasts the future level of consumer activity in the area and how general "brick and mortar" retail businesses will be impacted, for example supermarkets, entertainment venues and shopping centres.

Services such as OmniSci (screenshot above) are available, however working with raw Twitter data can help businesses to better optimise the data analysis for their specific goals and objectives.

Number of Airline Passengers

Many countries have introduced restrictions on the international travellers. As a result, the share price of many airlines have fallen significantly. Using data available on thousands of flights happening every day, we can model their capacity in real time and get a detailed insight into the utilisation of airplanes by each airline.

For example, below is a chart of an average flight time for selected flights between Beijing and Moscow, taken from FlightRadar24. There is a noticeable decrease since the start of 2020 and, especially since February. This is likely to have been caused by restrictions on international travellers introduced by the Russian Government, which has resulted in a decrease in the number of passengers on each flight. Reduced passengers travelling and airlines desperate to keep their allotted slots results in lighter planes and subsequently shorter flight times.

Larger and more granular datasets can offer a detailed up-to-date insight into the impact of Coronavirus on the airline industry, especially when compared to data over the last 3 to 5 years.

Impact on Holiday Travellers

Hospitality business is complimentary to the airline industry and is impacted by similar underlying economic drivers. Google Trends makes available historic data on Google searches. It is a good leading indicator of brand/business popularity as it is intent driven. Aggregating data across brands and different locations allows one to predict future trend in sales. Below is an example of the Google Trends result for "airbnb" searches done from Italy in the last 5 years. It is clear that the seasonal Spring pick up trend will not happen this year.

More sophisticated analysis can be done using Google Trends API, which you can query a large amount of data at very granular levels. For businesses, this data can help to predict demand in the coming months and plan their resources accordingly.

Conclusion

Free and paid data sources are available online for analysis. Many businesses also have an advantage over financial investors with proprietary datasets available for in-depth analysis. With sufficient urgency and healthy bias towards action many businesses can leverage numerous data points to position themselves better for the future and gain advantage over their slow moving competitors.

The final important ingredient is talent with an ability to think creatively. In these extraordinary times, an extraordinary mindset that leaves no stones unturned definitely goes a long way.