Market & Alt Data Insight Brief
Five Rings Joins BMLL Client Product Advisory Board
Financial data and analytics provider BMLL has welcomed proprietary trading firm Five Rings to its Client Product Advisory Board (CPAB). The New York-based firm will contribute its technological and market structure expertise to help shape BMLL’s future product roadmap, supporting the board’s mission to elevate historical market data standards across the industry.
Five Rings utilizes the BMLL Data Lab, a scalable Python research sandbox providing access to Level 3 order book data, alongside the BMLL Data Feed for flexible delivery. The trading firm relies on this high-fidelity data to explore market opportunities and enhance its quantitative research workflows across various asset classes. This includes utilizing BMLL’s Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA) options data, which has been available since November 2024 and features over seven years of historical, nanosecond unconflated data.
Launched in February 2025, the CPAB serves as a collaborative forum aligning sovereign wealth funds, asset managers, banks, liquidity providers, and proprietary trading firms. Member firms work together to define best-in-class data symbology, normalization protocols, and delivery methods for the wider market. BMLL’s global historical data coverage currently spans more than 100 trading venues across equities, ETFs, futures, and US equity options, including 100% of the MSCI World Index.
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 to supply chains, company fundamentals and broader financial markets
Clients now have access to expert coverage across more than 12 industries within the energy ecosystem, including oil and gas, LNG, clean energy, power, metals, chemicals, agriculture and shipping. The content is surfaced through Capital IQ Pro’s generative AI features, including Document Intelligence and ChatIQ, allowing users to connect energy market dynamics to company fundamentals and investment decisions within a single workflow.
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 flow (DCF), trading multiples, transaction multiples, venture capital methods and leveraged buyout (LBO) models. Outputs – including enterprise value, equity value and waterfall calculations – flow back into Cobalt and are tracked alongside portfolio performance and reporting. Valutico’s platform draws on FactSet market data, including public company financials, estimates, comps and M&A transaction multiples.
The partnership comes amid a broader push by major data and analytics vendors – including BlackRock with its Aladdin/Preqin integration and JP Morgan with Private Market Data Solutions – to centralise private-markets workflows around a single system of record.
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 risks and event-driven dislocations before they trigger market reactions.
The hub integrates financial data, restructuring developments, and M&A activity for over 2,100 hard-currency corporate bond issuers. It offers deep coverage of high-yield and crossover credits, supported by ten years of historical data and detailed financials for 1,700 companies. Users can utilise AI-driven research to extract insights from more than 7,000 bond prospectuses and documents, significantly reducing manual research time.
This launch follows the introduction of REDD for Sovereign Debt and features a redesigned interface with personalised alerts and custom watchlists. By consolidating fragmented data and local expert insights into a single experience, the platform enables portfolio managers and credit analysts to track developments from origination through to secondary market performance.
BridgeWise Utilises X Data in New Wealth-Focused Sentiment Analysis Tool
Wealth management financial technology specialist BridgeWise has collaborated with X to integrate data from the social media platform into its intelligence engine to provide social sentiment analysis for thousands of securities.
The system utilises an API-driven connector and a proprietary framework to convert unstructured data into structured signals for financial institutions. The resultant SentimentWise is a solution intended to allow users to monitor shifts in investor mood and identify trends through the analysis of both fundamental and alternative data. The offering builds on BridgeWise’s acquisition of Context Analytics.
BridgeWise co-founder and chief executive Gaby Diamant said the arrangement turns global conversations into a quantifiable tool to assist investors with decision-making.
“Markets move on more than just numbers; they move on what people are saying, thinking, and feeling in the moment,” Diamant said. “By plugging X’s data stream into our engine alongside our deep fundamental and technical analysis, we’re helping our clients cut through the noise to see what actually matters.”
Sentiment analysis uses algorithms to evaluate public opinion and social media activity to gauge potential market movements.
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 efficiency and immediacy,” said Fitch Solutions chief commercial officer Christopher Sparke. “It reduces the distance between question and answer, enabling our clients to access the signals, commentary, and data they need to inform investment and risk management decisions.”
Future updates will include additional capabilities from CreditSights, BMI, and Sustainable Fitch to expand the available dataset. MCP is an open standard that enables AI assistants to connect with data sources and tools across different platforms.
ExtractAlpha Relaunches AlphaClub Research Workspace with Expanded Signal Coverage
ExtractAlpha has relaunched AlphaClub, its research workspace for investment professionals evaluating the firm’s quantitative stock selection signals and alternative datasets. The update introduces a redesigned interface, broader international coverage, and a workflow-oriented structure aimed at making signal discovery and evaluation more efficient.
The platform is positioned as an environment where hedge fund analysts, portfolio managers, quant teams, and research professionals can explore ExtractAlpha’s offerings, examine how individual signals are constructed, and assess where they might fit within an existing investment process. Updates include faster navigation, cleaner layouts, longer signal histories, and expanded global context across the firm’s datasets.
“AlphaClub is not a data terminal,” says Vinesh Jha, CEO at ExtractAlpha. “It’s a practical research workspace that helps investors understand what our signals are, how they behave, and where they may add value.” This framing is a notable positioning point in a market where evaluation tooling for alternative data signals has tended to lag the sophistication of the signals themselves.
AlphaClub is available via free membership for qualified investment professionals.
73 Strings Unifies Data Operating System for Private Markets Participants
Private markets valuation and portfolio intelligence platform 73 Strings has launched a unified global operating model, which the company said “brings together the platform, people, and clients into one ecosystem”.
This transition aligns global teams to support clients across private equity, private credit, venture capital and infrastructure, it said.
“Private markets are entering a new era, defined by data, AI and the need to operate at scale,” said Yann Magnan, chief executive and co-founder of 73 Strings. “Our global operating model… allows us to innovate faster and help our clients stay ahead, while maintaining the rigour and trust that underpin investment decisions.”
The firm has appointed Jazmin Hogan as global head of client operations to lead the client organisation from New York. Hogan previously held leadership roles at Apollo Global Management, Blackstone and Kohlberg & Company.
73 Strings’ integrated platform combines valuation, portfolio monitoring and data extraction to replace fragmented spreadsheet-based processes.
BMLL Integrates SpiderRock Options Analytics into Data Lab Environment
BMLL has expanded its cross-asset research capabilities by making SpiderRock’s Options Print Set data available through the BMLL Data Lab. This integration allows institutional clients to analyse the relationship between options markets and underlying cash equity behaviour within a single, unified framework. By combining SpiderRock’s print-level analytics with BMLL’s historical data, users can better evaluate how dealer positioning and hedging flows influence intraday price formation.
The partnership provides access to SpiderRock’s implied volatility and Greeks data alongside BMLL’s existing datasets for equities, futures, and options. This data suite is designed to support quantitative research and strategy development, offering insights into how options hedging affects spot liquidity and market microstructure. The collaboration aims to help market participants understand the dependencies between different asset classes to improve trading and market intelligence.
The addition of SpiderRock data aligns with BMLL’s broader strategy of consolidating high-value partner datasets with its own historical analytics. This move is intended to streamline the research process for clients, enabling them to gain a more comprehensive view of market interdependencies and risk.
BMLL Historical Data Launches on Databricks Marketplace
BMLL, the independent provider of historical market data and analytics, has made its datasets available via the Databricks platform. This move is part of the firm’s broader strategy to offer flexible delivery mechanisms, complementing its existing API, SFTP, and S3 options. The collaboration was driven by customer demand and guidance from the BMLL Client Product Advisory Board, with initial adoption already seen among major global investment management firms.
The integration allows market participants to access granular data across equities, ETFs, futures, and options directly within their existing Databricks workflows. To facilitate ease of use, BMLL has provided a series of marketplace notebooks designed by quantitative analysts. These tools enable users to evaluate the product suite with minimal integration effort and lower data storage costs, accelerating the transition from raw data to actionable insights.
The platform supports various financial functions, including execution analysis, backtesting, and market surveillance. By providing granular, normalised historical data on a scalable platform, BMLL aims to help firms perform more efficient analysis. The initiative reflects a commitment to meeting the growing industry demand for sophisticated data engineering while providing flexibility in how large-scale datasets are discovered and evaluated.