Market & Alt Data Insight Historical, Fundamental & Index Data The latest content from across the platform
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…
From Quiet Practice to Explicit Disclosure: How the Fed’s Alt-Data Use is Reshaping the Macro Stack
At the October 2025 FOMC press conference, during the federal government shutdown that had interrupted the flow of official statistics, Chair Jerome Powell did something the Federal Reserve has rarely done in public: he cited the alternative datasets from PriceStats, Adobe and ADP that the central bank was leaning on. For many observers of the…
Bloomberg’s Macro Point-in-Time Launch Highlights Importance of Consensus Evolution
Vendor announcements about point-in-time macro data tend to compete on the same three axes: how many indicators, how many countries, how far back. Bloomberg’s launch this week of its Economic Releases and Surveys Point-in-Time dataset hits all three credibly – more than 3,000 indicators, over 100 economies, history to 1997 – and ties the dataset…
ISI Launches AI-Powered Corporate Debt Intelligence Platform for Emerging Markets
ISI, a global provider of market intelligence, has launched a new platform designed for investors, bankers, and advisers focusing on emerging market corporates. Powered by REDD intelligence and the proprietary AI tool AskISI, the platform covers public bonds, private credit, and primary debt issuance. It aims to provide transparency in opaque markets by surfacing credit…
Fitch Builds Fitch Nexus MCP Connector to Ratings Data
Fitch Solutions has launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector, Fitch Nexus, that enables clients to access Fitch Ratings content through internal AI applications and large language models. The connector provides credit research, historical ratings data and financial forecasts through a single integration. “Fitch Nexus is designed to deliver faster, more actionable insights with greater…
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…