Cut Through the Noise: Investing with Big Data

Foursquare, the check-in app that launched in early 2009, may not strike you as a big data app.

When its CEO, Dennis Crowley, stepped down from his role to become executive chairman in January 2016, the outlook for the company may have seemed grim. What was a social media app going to do if no one was using it?

The Wall Street Journal wrote after his resignation that Foursquare struggled to identify a sustainable business model in the market.

What’s surprising is that the location tracking service managed to rise up and its new CEO yesterday maintained that Foursquare will hit $100M in profitability in the next few years.

Foursquare found a solution for its business model problem: a whole slew of analytics services available for companies, like Chipotle CMG, looking to use big data analytics to help grow their business. For example, Foursquare’s Apple Store foot traffic data data accurately predicted iPhone sales figures AAPL.

Consumer data has always been a hot commodity, but recently it has been popping up in the fintech sphere. Companies are making it even more convenient to access data stats through online services.

Algorithms to analyze data are becoming more prolific as computers are becoming more advanced.

Take Chaikin Analytics, for instance, a web-based stock analytics firm operating out of Philadelphia. According to Crunchbase the company has raised almost $5M in its last six rounds.

The company’s analytics-powered predictive model outperformed the market by over 50 percent in small-and-large caps stock plays in its first year.

Chaikin Analytics was also recently added to a list of Benzinga’s exhibitors at the 2016 BZ Awards.