Novus Data
Nothing is made in one place any more.
A drought at a canal, a strike at a terminal, a licence withheld on one processed metal — none of it stays where it happens. It travels through the ships, ports, contracts and inventories that every business now sits downstream of, and it surfaces somewhere far from where it started, usually as a cost, a delay or a missed quarter. Novus Data follows it the whole way: from the disruption, to the lane, to the company.
Accounts are not open yet
Our mission
To make disruption in physical trade legible to the people it reaches — early enough to act on, and sourced well enough to trust.
What we do at Novus Data
Three things, and they feed each other. The register records the problem, the chart says who it lands on, and the briefing explains what it means.
The register
A live record of what is going wrong in physical trade — chokepoints, ports, trade policy, industrial inputs, energy and labour. Each entry carries the date it was last reviewed, so you are never reading a month-old assessment as though it were today.
Open the register
The exposure chart
The part nobody else does. Every tracked problem is mapped to the companies and sectors it reaches, with the mechanism written out — not "affected", but how. A claim without a mechanism, a confidence level, a date and a source cannot appear on the chart at all. That is enforced in code.
Open the chart
The briefing
The Novus Data Briefing pulls the week together in writing and sends it by email — what moved, what it is likely to reach next, and what is worth ignoring.
Read the archive
In development
Novus Data Alerts
The register on your phone, and a notification when it changes — a new disruption opens, one you follow escalates, or a company you hold is added to a problem you are already watching. You find out when it happens rather than when you next think to look.
It is being built now and there is no release date worth announcing yet. Subscribers to The Novus Data Briefing hear first.
Why it is worth your time
If you invest
Physical trade breaks before prices move. A chokepoint closing absorbs vessel capacity across a whole market, not one route; a licence on one processed metal can reprice a sector that looked diversified. The gap between the event and the repricing is the only part you can act in.
The exposure chart is built to close that gap honestly. It tells you which names sit downstream of a problem and, crucially, how strong the evidence is — reported, inferred or estimated — so you can size your conviction to ours.
If you run a business
A rerouting adds weeks to transit time, which changes safety stock, working capital and every promise you have made downstream — and the decision usually has to be taken before the disruption is confirmed.
The register gives you the problem with its date and its sources attached, so you can judge it yourself rather than act on a headline. Where your suppliers or your own category appear on the chart, the mechanism is written out, which is what makes it usable in a conversation with a board or a customer.
What Novus Data watches
- Container shipping and freight rates
- Spot and contract rates on the main lanes, and the capacity carriers deploy against them.
- Chokepoints and canal transits
- Suez, Panama, Bab el-Mandeb, Hormuz, Malacca — and the conditions that throttle them.
- Ports, terminals and inland connections
- Throughput and dwell time at major ports, and the rail and road that clear them.
- Trade policy, tariffs and export controls
- Tariffs, sanctions and licensing rules, read for scope and effective date rather than headline.
- Critical minerals and industrial inputs
- Concentrated upstream supply, and the refining steps where the concentration bites.
- Energy and bunker costs
- The fuel cost of moving goods, and the regulation attached to it.
- The macro data trade moves through
- The releases that describe physical trade, read for the trade components rather than the headline.
Subscribe to The Novus Data Briefing
Delivered by email. Free.
Novus Data Alerts
Notifications when the register changes. Not built yet.
Novus Data is written by Gavin McGreevy. How it is produced.