Amid a wider October-November market rout and liquidations across Wall Street hedge funds (such as Walleye Capital and Millennium), unverified rumors spread online claiming that Lone Pine Capital had collapsed. Walleye Capital is cutting a substantial portion of its internal long/short business and returning capital to investors after a brutal October. Millennium has reportedly pulled more than $1.5 billion in leveraged capital from two outside managers. Lone Pine Capital’s flagship hedge fund had surged over 40% in the first half of 2026, but suffered a sharp 30% drop in the third quarter after heavy bets on artificial intelligence and tech stocks soured. Lone Pine lost an additional 8.8% before fees in October, bringing its year-to-date performance down to a 7.5% pre-fee loss through October.
BattleFin New York Event Recap
A fantastic day at the iconic New York Athletic Club brought together leading voices in Alternative Data, AI and Investment Research to explore the technologies, datasets and ideas shaping the future of investment intelligence.
From hands-on AI workshops and thought-provoking panels to exciting product showcases and our signature 1:1 meetings, there was no shortage of innovation, insight and great conversations.
Some highlights from the stage:
Qualitate & Insight Partners — Sagar Kadakia and Crissy Costa Behrens explored how human expertise and qualitative insights can be transformed into differentiated investment signals.
AggKnowledge, FirstParty & Brickroad — Dan Entrup, Dawson Smith and Freeman Lewin unpacked the evolving economics of corporate data monetization and the opportunities emerging with AI.
Hebbia & Exabel — Daniel Wheller and Øyvind Wergeland explored how knowledge graphs can connect fragmented information and accelerate financial research.
Nimble & Mainwave — Uriel Knorovich and Rob Bailey shared perspectives on building practical AI strategies for 2027 and beyond.
Datasur, Filot & CredoIQ — Showcasing innovations spanning global trade intelligence, autonomous financial modelling and real-time executive interview analytics.
validityBase — Dan Averbukh tackled a critical question for investment teams: how do we separate genuine alpha from backtest illusions?
A huge thank you to all our speakers, sponsors, partners and attendees for making this another memorable BattleFin Discovery Day.
Buy Side Performance & News
October was a different story. A sharp technology selloff, bond market volatility, and US midterm election uncertainty combined to produce one of the broadest industry downturns since the Covid-19 pandemic, per Hedgeweek. Marshall Wace Eureka fell 5.4%, FengHe slipped 5.6%, and Arini dropped another 12.1% in October, taking its year-to-date loss to 26% and triggering margin calls from lenders. Goldman Sachs data shows hedge funds cut leverage at the fastest pace since March.
Not everyone had a bad month. Quantedge gained 7.2% in October and is up 60% on the year. Citadel delivered a 1.7% gain. Soroban's two funds finished positive. Keystone remains up 45% year to date. Macro and CTA funds held up comparatively well. The dispersion story that has defined 2026 — a widening gap between the best and worst performers — has rarely been clearer than in October's numbers.
The SS&C GlobeOp Forward Redemption Indicator for October came in at 1.62%, down from 2.02% in September — the lowest reading since April's all-time low of 1.26% and well below the five-year average of 2.06%. Despite October's performance pain, investors appear to be staying put rather than pulling capital.
On the broader industry: Man Group's AUM rose nearly 7% in Q3 to a record $270.9bn. D.E. Shaw grew to a record $125bn. Saba Capital Management generated a 42% net return from its UK investment trust activist strategy in the first nine months of 2026.
New Fund Launches
Augnition Global Investors, the new technology-focused hedge fund from Jeff Wang, a former senior investment manager at Sequoia Capital, has raised more than $1bn at launch
Borel Capital, a systematic trading firm founded by Adrien Chicot, a former quantitative researcher at Andurand Capital Management, has launched and is recruiting quantitative research interns to develop strategies across asset classes. No AUM announced at launch.
Closures and Redemptions
Arini Capital Management, the London-based credit hedge fund, is facing mounting pressure from lenders as losses exceed 26% year to date. The fund has been forced to raise fresh capital and sell billions in debt holdings as margin calls intensify. No formal closure announced, but operating in increasingly constrained conditions.
Two Sigma Investments has halted fundraising at its real estate division after falling short of its $2bn target, cutting several senior executives. The wind-down does not affect Two Sigma's core quantitative hedge fund strategies.
The SS&C GlobeOp October Forward Redemption Indicator of 1.62% — the lowest since April — suggests investors are largely holding their hedge fund allocations rather than filing for redemption.
New Product Launches
AlphaROC has launched Edwin, an AI-powered self-serve study builder designed for investment teams. Edwin lets analysts write, preview, and launch proprietary surveys on identity-verified respondents.
Valan Technologies has launched Terminal 8, a company intelligence platform built on the world's public contracts record — 120M+ contract awards and 32M+ tenders from 100+ official sources, with buyers in 168 countries, linked to 3,400+ listed companies.
Orbit launched its AI-native equity screening agent at orbitfin.ai, offering natural-language stock screening across 75,000+ companies in 120 countries via MCP.
SatYield announced a data partnership with Zema Global, integrating satellite-derived crop yield analytics into Zema's energy and commodities data management platform.
MFMsoft is offering independent merchant POS transactional data covering 220,000+ merchants at the item level — SKU-level purchase data for granular same-store sales analysis and basket composition research.
Particle launched Speaker Expertise, surfacing 24 million back-catalog podcast episodes indexed by speaker credential and topic, plus Ask Ray, an AI agent that traverses the archive on demand.
Transient launched TokenOps (AI agent auditability and control) and the AI CFO Agent (financial oversight automation). Separately, Caddie.AI introduced AllocatorIQ, processing Form ADV filings to generate capital-raising intelligence.
BWG Global launched a Quant dataset — structured primary research delivered via REST API and MCP — packaging expert network intelligence into machine-readable signals.
Daloopa announced an MCP integration with Heron AI Events, combining structured financial data extraction with expert interview intelligence through a single connection.
Qualitate launched AI-native primary intelligence coverage for the medtech sector, beginning with continuous glucose monitoring (CGM).
Big Data Federation's Financial AI added intraday strategy back-testing via natural-language prompts and launched a ChatGPT MCP integration bringing its data and analytics into the ChatGPT workflow.
Apptopia launched sector-based complete datasets with MCP access — bundling app intelligence into sector-ready packages (retail, fintech, travel) queryable through an MCP server.
State Street Global Markets introduced PriceStats Superset, expanding its daily price index with item-level SKU granularity for drill-down to individual categories before CPI prints.
TenderAlpha launched its B2B Unified Feed, mapping supplier-buyer relationships across 100+ countries from public procurement data, now available via MCP.
Kaleidoscope launched Console, a SEC-native research platform indexing and cross-referencing the SEC EDGAR corpus.
ConsciESG launched Nova, an ESG progress scoring dataset tracking companies' actual movement toward sustainability commitments — measuring momentum rather than static ratings. Methodology at SSRN.
Guideline launched Signal, mapping advertising spend to ticker-level investment intelligence — tracking brand-level ad spend shifts before financial results appear.
Borealis Global Analytics launched DataLab, a systematic country factor analytics platform covering 120+ factors across 87 countries for macro funds and global asset allocators.
MarketCheck launched Pre-Earnings Channel Check Reports for the automotive sector, compiling dealer-level inventory, pricing, and transaction data to generate bottom-up revenue estimates for KMX, GM, Ford, and CVNA.
xyt launched ETF Retail Insights, tracking retail buy/sell imbalances in ETF trading to give institutional traders a window into retail positioning and rebalancing pressure dynamics.
Data News & Insights
GlobalData published a white paper on the gap between data centre capacity announcements and grid connection timelines — finding twice as much capacity announced globally as the grid expects to connect by 2030.
Orbit published new research on institutional access to A-share companies via research visit transcripts, covering foreign fund participation in Chinese company research visits.
Visualping shared research on US federal government (.gov) website change patterns — a signal layer for macro and policy-focused funds, as policy changes often appear on web properties days before official press releases.
Know Trend published a data-driven article on how negative media coverage of credit risk correlates with subsequent spread widening.
Datago published research on RISA-Korea — South Korean retail investor sentiment — revealing systematic intraday and intraweek rhythms in Korean retail flows.
LunarCrush released a midterms social data analysis tracking sentiment divergence between Democrats and Republicans, with ticker-level signal for clean energy names like FSLR and ENPH.
validityBase published a piece on what institutional investors should look for in an alternative data backtest — covering methodology red flags, vendor-side optimism bias, and in-sample vs out-of-sample validation.
Market Prism published a working paper on narrative intelligence and equity returns, examining how deterministic AI surfaces structured signals from unstructured text.
Hatched Analytics shared an accuracy case study: their IBKR earnings coverage in October produced a revenue estimate within 0.2% of actual results, versus 9.3% average error from sell-side consensus.
TAC Index published its Air Cargo Equity Research Report (Issue 6), covering 240+ US-listed equities with meaningful exposure to air cargo volumes and pricing.
INRIX released its 2026 Parking Scorecard, benchmarking parking availability, pricing, and utilization across 120+ downtown areas in North America and Europe.
Silicon Data published research on GPU spot price dynamics and the information content of real-time GPU pricing for inference demand forecasting.
Matterfact shared research on the investment signal embedded in podcast data — covering 120 million+ episodes — arguing podcast content is a systematically underexploited primary research signal.
Context Analytics (via Bridgewise) published research demonstrating that aggregating sentiment across diverse investor communities dilutes — and can invert — the signal value. Their Three-Crowds framework separates retail, institutional, and professional communities.
Sequentum: Why Not Just Use Claude? | Sequentum White Paper examining the limitations of relying solely on LLMs for institutional web data acquisition. The paper explores how non-determinism can undermine institutional use cases, why enterprise data programs require more than an LLM to ensure reliable, repeatable, and verifiable web scraping at scale, and the architecture needed to support these requirements.
Upcoming Events
BattleFin Discovery Day Miami — January 20–22, 2027 | Nobu Eden Roc, Miami Beach
Three days of one-on-one meetings, panel sessions, and AI immersive workshops, bringing alternative data providers and AI technology platforms together with portfolio managers, research analysts, and data sourcing teams. VIP dinner on January 21st. Early pricing available.
Connected Data London 2026 — November 11–12, 2026 | Leonardo Royal Hotel London Tower Bridge, London. Connected Data London brings together data leaders, engineers, and investors for two days of sessions on data products, data marketplaces, and the future of data-driven decision-making.
Contact us at info@battlefin.com if you would like to contribute to this newsletter or need more info on any of above.