Market & Alt Data Insight Geospatial, Commodities & Physical-World Data The latest content from across the platform
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…
Zema Global and Natural Gas Intelligence Enhance North American Energy Data Partnership
Zema Global and Natural Gas Intelligence (NGI) have announced an enhanced data partnership designed to provide energy market participants with expanded natural gas pricing and flow data. Building on an existing seven-year relationship, the collaboration integrates NGI’s extensive datasets into Zema Global’s Decisioning Infrastructure to support curve analytics, portfolio valuation, trading, and risk management in…
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…
AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2026
AI adoption in capital markets has moved into a more disciplined phase. The priority is now controlled deployment: where AI can be used safely, where it can deliver measurable value, and how outputs can be governed, monitored and evidenced. The 2026 edition of the AI in Capital Markets Handbook examines how AI is being applied…
S&P Global Integrates Energy Insights Into Capital IQ Pro
S&P Global has integrated news and insights from S&P Global Energy into the S&P Capital IQ Pro platform, giving clients AI-powered access to proprietary intelligence across the global energy value chain. The integration is positioned as a response to heightened geopolitical uncertainty and the resulting volatility in global energy markets, which is increasingly feeding through…
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…
Beyond the Benchmark: Bloomberg Extends BCOM for a Fragmented Commodity Market
When the Bloomberg Commodity Index (BCOM) was launched in 1998, the architecture made sense for its time. Liquidity in commodity futures was concentrated in North American contracts denominated in US dollars, and the methodology was built accordingly. Twenty-eight years later the way global commodity markets operate and the way institutional investors want to access them…