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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)…
Alt Data’s New Competitive Edge: From Discovery to Synthesis
Has the alternative data industry crossed a maturity threshold? The competitive advantage has migrated from simply having access to novel datasets to building superior frameworks for combining them, and AI is the engine driving that shift. But as a panel of senior practitioners made clear at the recent A-Team/Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference in New…
Business Conduct Data in Demand as Risk Exposure Rises in a Complex World
Business conduct data is becoming more important to financial institutions as the risk of exposure to damaging incidents increases. A new survey of more than 500 C-suite risk leaders by RepRisk – a provider of data on business conduct risks faced by financial and other industries – found that four-fifths expect business conduct risk data…
Why Good Data Still Doesn’t Get Licensed: What Breaks Trials and What Fixes Them
The alternative data industry has a conversion problem. Vendors offer trials expecting them to sell themselves. Buy-side firms accept trials with genuine intent but competing priorities. The result is a gap between a promising evaluation and a signed contract where deals routinely die, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of…