Market & Alt Data Insight Private Markets 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…
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,…
FactSet Partners with Valutico to Integrate Private-Markets Valuation into Cobalt
FactSet has announced a partnership with Vienna-based valuation software provider Valutico to deliver an integrated valuation workflow for private capital markets, anchored within FactSet’s Cobalt portfolio monitoring platform. Under the partnership, portfolio company financials collected in Cobalt flow directly into Valutico’s valuation environment, where analysts can run income-, market- and asset-based methodologies including discounted cash…
Dynamo Restarts the Roll-Up: InvestHub Deal Signals Next Phase of Private Markets Ops Consolidation
Dynamo Software’s acquisition of Paris-based InvestHub, announced on 12 May, is the company’s first piece of M&A activity in more than three years, and the choice of target says as much about where private markets operations technology is heading as the deal itself. Between 2019 and 2022, Dynamo bought at pace under Francisco Partners’ ownership:…
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…