Just like oil, a popular comparison these days, data passes through a pipeline with several stages from its raw form to a refined product that can fuel a trading strategy. It is critical to pay careful attention to the quality of the final product to get the desired mileage out of it.

Sometimes, you get data in raw form and control the numerous transformations required for your purposes. More often, you deal with an intermediate product and should get clarity about what exactly the data measures at this point.

Different from oil, there is often no objective quality standard as data sources continue to proliferate. Instead, the quality depends on its signal content, which in turn depends on your investment objectives. The cost-effective evaluation of new datasets requires a productive workflow, including appropriate infrastructure that we will address in the following section.