Market & Alt Data Insight Historical, Fundamental & Index Data The latest content from across the platform
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…
What Changes When 40 Years of Factor Analysis Takes Minutes?
What limits a research team when a piece of factor analysis that once consumed a morning of a quant’s time collapses into a single prompt and an answer? A recent collaboration between Axioma by SimCorp and the AI firm EDS brings the issue into focus. The answer it points to is no longer the cost…
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…
Recorded Webinar: The Data Foundation for Alpha – How fragmented data is eroding hedge fund performance
Alpha depends on more than models, talent and execution. It depends on the quality, consistency and timeliness of the data behind every investment decision. Many hedge funds still operate with fragmented datasets, inconsistent identifiers and manual reconciliation processes that slow research, distort signals and increase operational risk. As firms scale across strategies, regions and asset…
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…
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…
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…