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A-Team Group Announces Capital Markets Technology APAC Awards 2026 Winners and Launches ‘State of the Market’ Report
A-Team Group today announced the highly anticipated winners of the Capital Markets Technology APAC Awards 2026. These prestigious awards celebrate the most innovative solution providers and financial institutions that are reshaping the capital markets technology landscape across the dynamic Asia Pacific region. In conjunction with the awards, A-Team Group has also launched the “State of…
How Much Hedge Fund Alpha Is Lost Before the Model Even Runs?
How often is a hedge fund’s apparent model failure actually a data failure in disguise? A model that stops working. A backtest that does not replicate. A risk number that needs explaining. How to tell one from the other – before reaching for the model first – was the recurring question of an hour-long discussion…
Are Firms Hunting Alpha Outside While Deleting It at Home?
A trading firm will pay for 15 years of price history from a market data vendor and, on a parallel housekeeping schedule, purge its own order flow, client activity and system logs after five to seven. The vendor history is treated as an asset worth a recurring licence fee. The firm’s own data – generated…
Is the Real Value of Intraday Alternative Data in Risk, Not Alpha?
Intraday alternative data has long been the preserve of high-frequency and systematic desks, where speed provides an edge. But ask practitioners what decision it actually changes for a discretionary book, and the answer is rarely about generating a new trade, it is more about testing the one already on. Sizing, conviction and the risk sitting…
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…
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…
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…
Alternative Data Grows Up: ADC London 2026 Turns to Operational Reality
For most of the past decade, alternative data conferences have asked the same underlying question in slightly different language: does this stuff actually produce alpha? The answer, settled some time ago for institutional buyers willing to do the work, has shifted the conversation. The questions on the agenda for the London edition of the Eagle…
When Everyone Has LLMs, Who do Quants Still Hire?
The democratisation of alternative data has been a recurring theme at industry conferences for several years. The arrival of capable large language models has accelerated it. Datasets that once required specialist teams to ingest and structure can now be parsed by anyone with a reasonable prompt; signals that once took weeks to extract can be…
The Case for Multimodal Macro: Toward a New Standard for Economic Measurement
Institutional investors still anchor macro trading decisions to government economic releases. But the data infrastructure behind those releases is eroding. For example, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which runs the surveys underpinning some of the most market-moving numbers in the world, has seen the response rate on its Job-openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTS survey)…