Die Halbwertszeit von Daten

A few months ago, a client told me they had ten years of market data stored and were ready to finally put it to use. They thought they were sitting on a gold mine. I looked at it and told them they'd need to start from zero.

The most important thing to understand about data is that every data point has a time to live. The moment you capture a piece of information and use it, that's when it's most valuable. But the longer it sits in a system untouched, the more its value declines. Eventually it reaches a point where the value is zero. And after that, it actually has negative value to you.

The companies with strong data quality are the ones where every data point serves a purpose in the business. Everyone else eventually faces the same realization: They've been storing information for years without knowing why.