What does it mean for companies to apply data to gain an edge?

Let me explain.

Data is best described as the oxygen that is provided to the lungs.

Competition is based on the business intelligence excavated from vast troves of data.

These insights enable companies to target proper growth drivers, migrate to revenue hotspots and add appropriate employee talent.

The data also delves into how to create product stickiness, customer loyalty, promote up-selling, and optimize operations.

It’s not me just saying this to hype up the phenomenon, and I can vouch that data-driven decisions have worked wonders for the Mad Hedge Technology Letter.

Other companies have reported robust performance in productivity and profitability margins up to 10% higher than analog companies.

A recent report showed that margins would expand wider after the first year to 10% and hit a roaring 15% after operations are further refined.

It's a world of data supremacy; it doubles in size every two years and will reach 70 zettabytes by next year.

Data is connected to every part of the model from marketing campaigns, to website traffic flow and activity engagement, to operational procedures.

Can you believe that only 10% of global data is currently being acted on?

It’s hard to digest that most companies are winging it without any rhyme or reason.

The world is way too complex to bring a knife to a gunfight.

Predictive insights used to be only reserved for Fortune 500 companies who could afford the high expense of applying these high-powered tools.

But after the recent wave of automation and cloud software, even individual proprietors can participate in this once-taboo management exercise because the costs have come down.

Going on gut instinct and best estimates can only get you so far in a rapidly digitizing world and the coronavirus has only made the volume of data explode and required insights into business that are much more important.

I would also say that companies must be vigilant in harnessing the data because the skyrocketing number of nefarious elements out there have corrupted many data forms.

Just recently, the Mad Hedge website was overpowered by a tsunami of bots scouring our website for data.

The bots overloaded our email distributer service with new subscriptions by registering 1000s of emails into our database which muddied our underlying data and our ability to glean salient insights into it.

Bots find the data needed to answer a question or solve a problem and the Mad Hedge Fund Trader website has been a target to find the best financial content in the English-speaking world.

Once the requisite data is in hand, bots identify what toolsets are needed to organize the data and produce predictive and prescriptive business insights.

Many of these bots use content to create trading algorithms based on stand-alone content from the Mad Hedge Fund Trader that acts as a direct input into the database.

This new form of business intelligence deploys machine learning software as a question or problem and generate actionable solutions.

They can categorize base cases, outliers, marginal cases, and errors that require further data cleaning, additional reporting, and queries.

Ultimately, these bots are the vehicles in which a final answer is populated such as whether or not to buy Amazon stock today or tomorrow and so on.

As we push into the 5G era, this same technology will be repurposed for the internet of things (IoT) translating into another wave of products being groomed and fine-tuned by machine learning.

Internet of Things (IoT) is the fastest-growing segment of data and already comprises 15% of total global data.

Physical products will need embedded sensors that will monitor the performance and send terabytes of data back to the data servers for data analysts to pick apart.

One example is a Geared Turbo Fan engine which requires 5,000 sensors that generate up to 10 GB of data per second.

Now you can understand why the volume of data is literally about to mushroom as 5G takes hold and why Amazon has been so hellbent in penetrating the smart home market.

Bots facilitate conversations between systems and data silos and allow your decision-makers to have the keys to the Ferrari.  

Bots enable an easy view of displaying key performance indicators (KPIs) and alerts on the run with simple charts and graphs.

As the coronavirus offers us glimpses into the world tomorrow, data analysts embedded all over the world will be harnessing bots to maintain your home thermostat or upgrade software in the rear of your smart microwave.

As we speak, the Mad Hedge Fund Trader website is gearing up for the next wave of data supremacy and I advise everyone else to get with the program.  

This is the world of the future and for companies who don’t adapt, they will be swept into the dustbin of history.