Trade Data provides insights into the macro movements of commodities from one country to another, helping users to identify flows, trends, and other insights. This data is typically gathered from the official statistics of the countries themselves, via customs agencies, as well as from bodies specifically designated to collect this data such as UN Comtrade.

This data typically works in arrears to allow the countries and other sources to collect and verify their customs figures. As a result this data is usually available 3 months in arrears, although this can significantly vary for some countries.

Suppliers of this data typically will ingest these disparate datasets and normalise them by removing conflicting data, errors, or mismatches in metrics so as to provide a clean and usable dataset.  

Examples of this would be two countries with differing reporting figures for import/export figures to each other, which would indicate either misreporting or an error. Suppliers will then conduct their own research and examine the figures with the aim of identifying the correct figure.

Benefits

As there are often errors or conflicting data within the different sources, purchasing this data from a supplier will save a significant amount of research time.

Trade Data from official sources is a strong benchmark for other datasets, for example commodity flows, as it would provide the reported statistics from each import/export country. This can help identify gaps in datasets, as well as test predictive models.

Drawbacks

The time delay means this data is useful for long term macroeconomic analysis, but generally can’t be deployed tactically for day-to-day use cases.

While official sources should be trustworthy, they often do not match. While suppliers can analyse other datasets they will often need to make judgement calls on the source of the data as to which is used, this can be open to interpretation.