Alternative data for stocks

A quarterly report tells you what happened three months ago. Alternative data is everything else that tracks a company in the meantime: what people post about it, how many of them follow it, what they spend, search and download. Kovered measures one slice of it, social attention, for 1,000 US stocks and ETFs, every day, free to read.

What is alternative data?

Alternative data is information about a company that the company did not publish and the exchange did not print. The traditional set is short: 10-K and 10-Q filings, earnings calls, press releases, share prices and trading volume, and the analyst estimates built on top of them. Everything outside that set is alternative.

The term came out of hedge funds in the 2010s, when firms started buying card transaction panels and satellite photos of retail parking lots to see a quarter while it was still happening. The appeal was timing. A filing describes a quarter that ended six weeks earlier; spending, foot traffic and social posts move the same day.

Today most of it is sold by data vendors to institutions, at institutional prices. The part a retail investor can read for free is mostly the public part: what people say about a stock on StockTwits and Reddit, how many of them follow it, and what shows up in search and app store charts.

Types of alternative data for stocks

Ten kinds come up again and again. The last column says, plainly, whether Kovered measures each one. Most of them it does not.

The alternative data Kovered measures

StockTwits readings. Once a day after the US close we read the public StockTwits page of every ticker on the site, from SPY and QQQ to NVDA, TSLA and Coca-Cola. We keep four numbers: watchers (people who follow the symbol), StockTwits' sentiment score (0 bearish, 50 neutral, 100 bullish), its message volume score (50 is the symbol's normal amount of posting) and whether the symbol is on the US trending list. The most followed tickers are read daily, the rest every three to fourteen days. See StockTwits trending and sentiment.

Reddit mentions. Every new post on r/wallstreetbets, r/stocks, r/investing, r/StockMarket, r/pennystocks, r/options is read every four hours, and each post that names a ticker on our list by its cashtag or symbol is counted once for that ticker. ETFs and the stocks with no consumer brands have been counted since 8 November 2026. Comments are not read. The counts are posts we found, never Reddit's own totals. See Reddit stocks and WallStreetBets most mentioned.

The Hype Score. One number from 0 to 100 for how much attention a ticker is getting against every other ticker we read: message volume 35%, watcher growth per week 25%, Reddit posts in 30 days 20% and watchers 20%. Sentiment is left out on purpose, so the score never leans bullish or bearish. See the Stock Hype Score.

Brand attention for consumer companies. 185 listed consumer companies also carry readings of the brands they own: Instagram followers and the posts mentioning each brand, news headlines, and which brands ChatGPT and Gemini recommend, added up by ticker. A company that reports forty brands in three segments gets a number per brand here. See the consumer company boards.

What Kovered does not measure

No web traffic, no app downloads, no card spending, no job postings, no satellite or phone location data, and no insider or congressional trades. Those need paid panels or a vendor's model to estimate, and a site whose rule is "measured or left blank" cannot print an estimate as if it were a reading. If you need those, the paid platforms on our list of AltIndex alternatives sell them.

There is also no share price, price target, forecast, AI pick or rating anywhere on Kovered. The Hype Score ranks attention, not the stock. A ticker at 90 has a lot of people looking at it; that is the whole claim.

How retail investors use alternative data for research

Not as a signal to trade on. The honest uses are smaller and more useful than that.

• Finding out why a ticker is in the conversation. A message volume score of 85 on a quiet day says something happened. The filing, the news or the earnings call says what.
• Telling a crowded trade from a quiet one. Two semiconductor stocks with similar businesses can have very different crowds. Watchers and Reddit posts show which one retail is piled into.
• Checking your own bias. If you only read one subreddit, the sentiment you see is that subreddit's. StockTwits' score and a count across six subreddits are wider samples, still not the whole market.
• Watching a consumer company between filings. Brand attention per ticker shows whether people are posting about the brands a company sells in the weeks between its reports.

Read alongside filings, never instead of them. Our alternative data vs traditional data explainer goes through the trade-off.

The limits of alternative data

Every alternative data set is a sample, and the sample has a shape. StockTwits sentiment comes from people who post on StockTwits, who lean toward active retail traders. Reddit counts come from six subreddits, and r/wallstreetbets alone can swing them. A card panel sees the customers of the banks in it. When the sample changes, the number changes, and it can look like the business changed when it did not.

Attention is also not approval. A ticker can be loud because people love it or because of bad news overnight. That is why the Hype Score leaves sentiment out and shows it beside the score instead, so you can see both and decide what they mean.

Social sentiment, the alternative data anyone can read

Of all the kinds in the table, social sentiment is the one a retail investor can check without a vendor contract. Our stock social sentiment page puts StockTwits' sentiment and Reddit's post counts side by side for every ticker we read, and each ticker has its own page: NVDA, SPY, TSLA.

Is there free alternative data for stocks?

Some. StockTwits and Reddit are public, and so is everything Kovered prints from them: no account, no trial, no paywall on any page. Search trend tools and app store charts are free to browse. The institutional sets, card panels and satellite imagery, are not, and nothing free replaces them. If you want our readings in your own code, the API sells them as credits.

Comparing tools? Kovered vs AltIndex sets the two side by side, and AltIndex alternatives covers the wider field.