Market & Alt Data Insight Blogs The latest content from across the platform
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…
Where Generative AI Belongs in the Institutional Data Stack – and Where It Doesn’t
Two and a half years into the generative AI cycle, the working consensus among practitioners deploying AI against unstructured content in capital markets has quietly settled into a layered architecture. Generative models sit at the desktop, research and operational-efficiency layer. The feed, signal and modelling layer that drives systematic alpha still runs on the older,…
Where Institutional Alts Capital Is Actually Going – And Who Is Still Receiving It
Institutional capital in private markets is not just slowing, it is narrowing. A new dataset drawn from fund administrator reporting flows suggests that the share of assets held by the largest managers has reached its highest level on record, that all but one alternative asset class saw net outflows in the final quarter of 2025,…
Dynamo Restarts the Roll-Up: InvestHub Deal Signals Next Phase of Private Markets Ops Consolidation
Dynamo Software’s acquisition of Paris-based InvestHub, announced on 12 May, is the company’s first piece of M&A activity in more than three years, and the choice of target says as much about where private markets operations technology is heading as the deal itself. Between 2019 and 2022, Dynamo bought at pace under Francisco Partners’ ownership:…