December Alt Data Round Up: What’s Shaping 2026

Happy New Year, and welcome back!

We have had a lot going on at Exabel from product updates that make it easier and faster with better results to get from data to insights to power your fundamental research to ramping up number of data products by more than 50% to expand and deepen coverage that helps with more precise forecasts.

The chatter and volatility in Silver in December piqued our interest and as we checked on the top countries based on silver reserves, found an interesting visual:

So much is locked away in Peru - now to find out the miners and processors!

Buy Side News

Citadel is set to return approx $5B to investors reducing AUM to around $67B according to a report by CNBC.

Tax regime changes in the UK are driving hedge fund founders to relocate. Alan Howard recently became a Swiss resident.

According to a GS client note, hedge funds have turned cautious on US Healthcare stocks due to uncertainties associated with government health policy and insurance subsidies.

Bridgewater Associates is planning a significant expansion of employee equity ownership following a standout 2025 for its flagship macro strategy.

Whitehaven Asset Management plans to return capital to investors and transition to a family office by 2027.

Peconic Partners, maintaining a cautious macro outlook and low net market exposure throughout the year, delivered a whopping 79% return in 2025 according to a report by Bloomberg.

Hedge Funds are deepening their exposure beyond traditional derivatives and increasing investments in physical commodities to diversify returns according to a report by FT.

Dubai is fast emerging as a hedge fund hub with the number of managers exceeding 100 for the first time in Dubai International Financial center according to a report by Bloomberg.

According to a Bloomberg report citing senior executives at Man Group and Brevan Howard, 2026 is setting up as a strong environment for macro and volatility oriented hedge funds driven by geopolitics, policy uncertainty and diverging rate cycles.

Candlestick Capital, the $2,1B hedge fund which launched in 2019, is shutting down after performance failed to meet the founders “extremely high standards” according to a report by Bloomberg.

According to a report by Institutional Investor, Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy at JPAM, highlighted warning signs as hedge funds are showing record levels of crowding, concentration and high beta exposure, with leverage rising sharply in some strategies.

According to a report by Reuters, Dmitry Balyasny, CEO of Balyasny Asset Management, has identified AI as the largest tail risk heading into 2026.
According to a report by Business Insider, Millennium Management suffered significant losses in its index rebalance strategies in November 2025.

Citadel has introduced an AI powered research tool to speed up analysis for its equities investors according to a report by Reuters. The AI Chatbot - trained on licensed data including transcripts, regulatory filings, brokerage research and the firm’s own strategies - is designed to surface risks, generate tailored research, and create reading lists aligned to an investor's portfolio.

New Fund Launches

Shiprock Capital Management is launching a fund with a new strategy based on enhanced debt trading capabilities.

Sirenia Capital Management is expected to launch soon with a focus on the healthcare sector and with capital commitment from Point72.

Millennium recently committed $850M to Armar Capital and $2.3B to Fulcrum Asset Management.

Zenith Alpha Management - a new multimanager recently launched with the aim of supporting early stage managers and providing investors with diversified exposure.

Appraisal Arbitrage - a strategy that challenges M&A deal prices in Delaware Chancery Court, is getting interest from an increasing number of hedge funds.

Ilex Capital Partners, the equity long-short multi-manager launched in London, has grown to $7B in assets following a fresh capital raise and performance gains.

Two Sigma Investments has launched three new hedge funds this year and raised more than $1B in fresh capital taking total AUM to approx $70B.

THE DATA CORNER

Insights & News

StateStreet published a white paper that investigates the impact of media narratives surrounding worker layoffs, hiring and labor shortages on stock returns. It quantifies how labor related themes propagate through market sentiment and stock returns.

Alexandria Technology published back test results for news sentiment based factor construction and trading S&P futures in a long short strategy with a 1.6 Sharpe.

AKAnomics have an update based on their Macro Nowcasting platform for Q4 firm performance estimates - Machinery and Packaging are showing upside to revenues, Building Products is showing the opposite. To get the full picture across all Industrials, Materials, and Consumer sectors, register for their Jan 9th Webinar.

S&P Global Market Intelligence published Top 10 Economic Insights for 2026. It presents a nuanced view of global economic conditions for 2026, characterized by divergent regional growth patterns and evolving monetary policy landscapes.

Orbit Financial Technology published a whitepaper with comprehensive systematic analysis of AI investment bubble dynamics across a 156 week observation period involving NLP scoring across five independent dimensions of financial news coverage and highlighting implications for portfolio risk management.

Advan published their latest “Buysider Insights” showcasing how its data tracks and anticipates fundamentals across a wide range of sectors and tickers from AMZN and TSLA to WM, building materials, medical devices, leisure, autos and more. It highlights case studies where observed visits, shifts, and facility activity correlate strongly with revenues and volumes.

EquiLend has made a strategic investment in Digital Prime Technologies, a provider of institutional crypto financing and prime brokerage technology.

Trading Technologies has acquired OpenGamma, a specialist in derivatives margin analytics.

Product Launches

Guideline launched Customizable AI Agent Dashboards - a major enhancement to its AI driven analytics platform - that convert conversational insights into structured, persistent workspaces allowing analysts to maintain a continuous, living view of the market, supported by real world data rather than isolated snapshots.

SimilarWeb announced the launch of their Calibrated Web Performance datasets - built for quant investors with point-in-time signals.

Blue Heron recently released the “Diligence Library”, the largest interview transcript dataset covering CEO’s/Management teams at public and private companies. The library contains 13 years of proprietary investigative interview transcripts covering both CEO and Business due diligence topics. Backtesting shows that interviews marked “Negative” by the research team significantly underperforms the market.

OZMOSI launched version 2 of its clinical trial probability of success model incorporating new features and trained on 39,000 clinical trials delivering stronger predictive performance for Pipeline assessments and Biopharma catalyst events.

Sequentum launched its intelligent unblocker feature that automated the process of getting data collection agents unblocked.