A newOpimasreport,Web Scraping forInvestments – Asset Managers’Bid toGenerate Alpha Using the UltimateDataset, authored by founder and CEO Octavio Marenzi, estimates that, with 206 billion page views per day in 2018,web scraping for investments already accounts for an astounding 5% of all web traffic and that this activity will continue to grow rapidly in coming years.
Key findings of the report include:
- The web represents the ultimate dataset. By 2020, Opimas expects that there will be over two billion websites together with trillions of web pages.Asset managers, equity analysts, and traders are increasingly using web-based data and incorporating the resulting information into their decision-making processes.
- Total spending onweb scraping for investment purposes is expected to exceed $1.8 billion by 2020, with slightly more than two-thirds comprised by internal spending, but with external spending projected to experience accelerated growth in the near term.
- The number of web pages accessed daily for web scraping for investments exceeded an astounding 10 billion pages per day in 2018. The number of page views is expected to exceed 25 billion per day by 2022.
- The heaviest users of web scraping for investments harvest data from more than 100 million web pages daily.
- The volume of pages web scraped for investing rivals the busiest websites in the world, including Facebook and Google.
- Use cases for web-scraped data in the investment process are virtually limitless and range from sentiment analysis to economic data, price comparators, market data, company financial reports, corporate actions, reference data, and other types of data.
- The process of web scraping is complex, and web data extraction faces some potential impediments, notably regulation, legal challenges and anti-web-scraping technologies meant to prevent the capture of content. But since the appetite for data is immense, investment firms will increase their efforts in web scraping to collate enormousamounts of actionable data.
To view the entire report, please click here
