James McWhinney is a long-tenured Investopedia contributor and an expert on personal finance and investing. With over 25 years of experience as a full-time communications professional, James writes ...

Quantitative analysis is a branch of financial analysis that focuses on using data and mathematical techniques to inform investment decisions. Harry Markowitz pioneered modern quantitative analysis ...

Institutional investors face complex decisions—where to allocate capital, which managers to trust, how to weather volatility. These choices can’t rely on instinct alone. They require data, structure, ...

Business managers and directors used to rely on their experience and instinct to make tough decisions. Increasingly, however, they want to know what the numbers say. In the era of big data, ...

When you make business decisions as a manager, you take into account qualitative factors like reputations, brand strength and employee morale, as well as quantifiable data such as sales figures, ...

Elemental analysis methods are used to determine the elemental composition of a substance and the concentration of each element present. However, there are two different subsets: one for determining ...

Fixed income is a naturally quantitative asset class: the investor claims a predetermined, and thus quantifiable, stream of cash flows. This implies that greater accessibility of data and processing ...

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. If you run a business, you are likely aware of the importance of data. Nearly every company out there utilizes data to make decisions.