Market & Alt Data Insight Blogs The latest content from across the platform
Bloomberg Names Apptopia Its Flagship Mobile Data Source, Extending a Curated Alt Data Model
Bloomberg has named Apptopia its flagship mobile app data provider, making it the designated mobile source across 2,000 tickers on the alternative data platform that sits on the Terminal. The choice extends a model Bloomberg has been building for months: curating the alternative data that reaches Terminal users rather than simply aggregating it. The terms…
When Correlation Breaks: Why Crowding, Not Macro, Is Testing Quant Models
In February 2025, Goldman Sachs told clients the US equity market had become a stock-picker’s market: 74% of the typical S&P 500 stock’s return was being driven by company-specific factors rather than macro forces, against a 20-year average of 58%, and the bank expected that micro-driven environment to persist. Within weeks, sweeping tariff announcements had…
Kaiko Buys Amberdata as Digital Asset Data Consolidation Picks Up Pace
Kaiko has acquired Amberdata, its fifth acquisition and its second in a fortnight, in a deal that points less to any single transaction than to the speed at which the institutional digital asset data layer is consolidating into a small number of scaled providers. The Paris-headquartered firm announced the purchase of the US-based data and…
Testing an Assumption: Do AI Signals Really Decay?
Alpha decay is one of the foundational assumptions in quantitative finance. The empirical literature, beginning with McLean and Pontiff’s 2016 study of 97 anomalies and replicated and refined across multiple subsequent studies, has repeatedly found that returns degrade out-of-sample and degrade further once published. The assumption sits inside almost every institutional model risk framework as…
Scraping at Scale: Where AI Actually Helps, and Where It Doesn’t Yet
“AI web scraping that doesn’t break” was the title given to a fireside chat at the recent A-Team/Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference London – a phrasing that is, on its own terms, aspirational. Pipelines that self-maintain through site changes, schema drift and content shifts remain a destination rather than a current reality, and the session…
Where is the Edge When Everyone Has the Same Alt Data?
Has the institutional alternative data market reached a phase in which the easy sources of edge have closed? Datasets that once generated standalone alpha are widely distributed, the AI tooling layered on top of them is increasingly commoditised, and the differentiator has migrated to a less glamorous middle ground: validation, transformation, kill criteria, and the…
LexisNexis Q&A: Ensuring Data Trust, From News to Governance
Since the 1970s, LexisNexis has been providing a variety of data services to financial institutions. Data Management Insight spoke to Danielle McCormick, vice president of product, Nexis Solutions – LexisNexis, to discuss how financial institutions are approaching AI, trusted data and the future of enterprise intelligence. Data Management Insight: Hello Danielle, when were LexisNexis’ data…
Why MSCI’s PM Insights Acquisition Matters for Private Market Valuation
The assumption that private companies can be reliably valued through reference to their public-market peers is breaking down at exactly the moment a market-derived alternative is becoming viable. That structural shift – more than the transaction itself – is what makes MSCI’s acquisition of PM Insights, announced six weeks ago, worth paying attention to. A…
Is the Most Expensive Failure Mode in Alt Data on the User Side?
Asked at the A-Team/Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference, London last week which datasets his firm had ever taken out of production, one panellist paused, considered the question, and admitted he could not think of a single one. The answer was offered without defensiveness, as a genuine reflection. It also turned out to be one of…
Preqin Anchors Private Credit Analytics in Firm-Owned Data
When BlackRock unveiled expanded private credit capabilities on Preqin earlier this month, the announcement set out a vision of greater transparency across an asset class long defined by its opacity. The methodological choices behind that vision are what make it work: a deliberate decision to build benchmarks from firm-owned data only, to keep different fund…