Nowcasting

Nowcasting is forecasting's less glamorous, more useful cousin: instead of predicting the distant future, it estimates the present or the immediate past that has not yet been officially measured. In markets, that means using high-frequency alternative data to estimate a company's current-quarter revenue weeks before it reports, or to gauge economic activity ahead of a government statistic.

The technique works because real-world activity leaves traces - card spend, foot traffic, shipping movements - that arrive continuously, while the official figure arrives once and late. A nowcast blends those noisy, partial signals into a running estimate that tightens as more data lands. Its accuracy depends entirely on the freshness and calibration of the inputs, which is why it is a natural consumer of real-time data.