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Clearstream Partners with Ares to Boost Access to Private Markets
Clearstream, the post-trade business of Deutsche Börse Group, has partnered with alternative investment manager Ares Management Corporation to add Ares’ private market strategies to its fund platform. The collaboration aims to simplify the investment process for fund distributors, allowing them to access private market investments with the same operational efficiency as traditional mutual funds. For…
MCPs in Data Management: Bringing New Order to Private Markets
Financial institutions have begun deploying Model Context Protocols (MCPs) as they have expanded the use of artificial intelligence applications and agents. The technology developed by Anthropic is an open-source contextual layer that helps coordinate models and data, enabling AI applications to connect with a multitude of other platforms and processes. In the first of a…
Direct Lending Practitioners Target Large Tech Budget Growth on Data
An overwhelming majority of private credit market practitioners are planning to substantially increase their technology budgets as they seek to address risks that are contributing to concerns about the direct lending sector. The Compass 2026 survey conducted for Oxane Partners – a technology provider for credit and other private markets – found that almost four-fifths…
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…
Why MSCI’s PM Insights Acquisition Matters for Private Market Valuation
The assumption that private companies can be reliably valued through reference to their public-market peers is breaking down at exactly the moment a market-derived alternative is becoming viable. That structural shift – more than the transaction itself – is what makes MSCI’s acquisition of PM Insights, announced six weeks ago, worth paying attention to. A…
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…
Preqin Anchors Private Credit Analytics in Firm-Owned Data
When BlackRock unveiled expanded private credit capabilities on Preqin earlier this month, the announcement set out a vision of greater transparency across an asset class long defined by its opacity. The methodological choices behind that vision are what make it work: a deliberate decision to build benchmarks from firm-owned data only, to keep different fund…
Where Institutional Alts Capital Is Actually Going – And Who Is Still Receiving It
Institutional capital in private markets is not just slowing, it is narrowing. A new dataset drawn from fund administrator reporting flows suggests that the share of assets held by the largest managers has reached its highest level on record, that all but one alternative asset class saw net outflows in the final quarter of 2025,…