November Alt Data Roundup: Funds Raising Capital, Research, New Data Product Releases & More
And just like that, it's December....
At BattleFin Group we just cycled on 1 year anniversary of Exabel joining our company. Since the merger, use cases that are resonating most on the platform include:
If you haven’t done a demo of the platform BOOK HERE. See how you can leverage Exabel to test data heading into our BattleFin Miami Event January 21st-23rd. .
Buy Side News
Multi Manager AUM Booms: ARTICLE HERE.
Michael Burry has closed his hedge fund, Scion Asset Management, according to a report by Reuters and has set up a subscription only substack to share his notes and opinions. His comment on NVDA: “I am not claiming Nvidia is Enron. It is clearly Cisco.”
Sona Asset Management, a $15B AUM fund, is positioning to capitalize on recent turmoil in European leveraged loans according to a report by Bloomberg.
Coatue Management co-led a $2.3B Series D financing round for Anysphere, backing its Cursor platform and pushing the firm’s valuation to roughly $29B, triple the level from 6 months ago.
Digital Assets saw approx $5B in outflows - the third largest four week outflow streak since 2018 according to data from CoinShares.
Capital Fund Management has returned approx $2B from its flagship Stratus fund to investors, as its AUM peaked at $21B in September, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Marshall Wace is planning to return approx $3B to investors across two of its flagship funds, choosing to reign in asset growth to protect performance, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Verition Fund Management is expanding its energy trading platform, hiring around 10 senior energy traders across London and Dubai over the past year.
Peter Thiel’s hedge fund - Thiel Macro - liquidated its entire Nvidia position in Q3, offloading 538K shares, following SoftBank’s disposal of its own Nvidia stake earlier in the month. Tiger Global sharply cut its exposure to Meta in Q3, reducing its stake by 63% based on the funds 13F filings.
Rokos Capital Management has achieved returns exceeding 20% so far in 2025, according to a report by Financial News.
Rob Citrone’s Discovery Capital Management posted 6.6% gain in October resulting in 2025 returns exceeding 33% through Oct end.
Dymon Asia has delivered a strong 14.8% return through October, 2025, extending its gains after a 1.6% advance in October.
Two Sigma Investments has emerged as a leading investor in China after its equity strategy rose approx 52% through September 30th with AUM at $1.4B according to a report by Bloomberg.
Point72 Asset Management, the $41.5B hedge fund, is planning to expand into private credit, targeting longer term less liquid markets according to a report from Bloomberg.
New Fund Launches
Y-Intercept, HK based quant manager backed by Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, has raised more than $1.7B for its first fund open to external investors.
Decagon Asset Management, a hedge fund backed by Squarepoint Capital, has secured SMA commitments bringing its AUM to around $450M.
Catalonia Capital Management public equities fund - a healthcare focussed strategy - recently got an allocation of $200M from Brevan Howard.
Millennium Management, the $79B mult-strat hedge fund, is raising $5B fund for a new vehicle focussed on private market opportunities.
THE DATA CORNER
Insights & News
A new white paper on PriceStats product from State Street demonstrates an early read on inflationary changes in specific categories that are missing in the overall inflation measures. The sector level granularity sheds light on real world impact of trade policy and enables timely action.
M&A doesn’t just reshape companies; it can quietly break your alternative data models. With no standard for how vendors treat acquisitions, brand mapping becomes a major source of KPI distortion. Check out the EXABEL WHITE PAPER.
Curious about the surge in WTI demand earlier this fall? Check out Refinery Calc’s forecast from August 2025 and its confirmation in October, 2025 - enough lead time for folks to digest the data and set up positions.
Guideline published an article showing increased Ad spending during the government shutdown. Check out what they have to say on Travel and Pharma sectors based on forward bookings.
SensorTower published their Q3 2025 Digital Market Index report showing strong performance in global in-app purchases and digital advertising ecosystem with non-gaming apps surging 21% to $22.3B - led by gen AI at nearly $1.5B. ChatGPT climbed to #2 worldwide in IAP revenue, behind TikTok. Very granular report - analysis by markets, categories, apps, games, digital advertising, and key insights on retail media. SensorTower also published insights on Gemini usage across iOS and Android, including non-app engagement on Android. Its shows surging user engagement with Gemini after the Nano Banana launch and a big marketing push. Does this pose a risk for competing gen-AI services like ChatGPT?
TenderAlpha published a paper on unlocking alpha in government contracts by adjusting receivables data for contract maturity showing ideas that can be further refined for improving performance and returns. The research reveals overlooked opportunities, especially among smaller or less-followed companies with longer term government contracts.
Brain Company announced results from their mid frequency crypto strategy - return of 28.3%, Sharpe of 2.1 and volatility of 25.9.
Looking for an alternative to often delayed or outdated government statistics? Check out Prosper Insights podcast on forward looking consumer models based on zero-party consumer data that can be used to accurately forecast major indicators such as employment, housing, consumer spending, and auto sales weeks or months ahead of government reports.
Apptopia published a report on ChatGPT usage declining over the last few months in terms of both the number of times the App is opened and amount of time spent with the app. To see which segments are engaging less and where engagement is starting to move, check out the report.
Speech Craft Analytics published a white paper on how transcripts don't do justice in extracting information from earning calls as they are multi-modal. The paper shows that voice itself carries a distinct and economically meaningful information. These acoustic signals predict short and medium term excess returns implying that markets may be missing out on PNL generation by relying just on transcripts.
Permutable.AI published a guide for institutional investors, quants, and macro strategists on applying news sentiment to trading, risk management, and regime detection, with examples taken from Permutable AI’s market sentiment data.
Product Launches
Sequentum announced the beta release of Sequentum Cloud’s AI Magic Wand - a new way for organizations to build scraping agents. The embedded AI intelligently generates extraction logic from scratch without relying on generic schemas.
Looks like the folks at Kadoa don’t sleep. They have been a regular in our roundups and are back with a Python and Node SDK release to generate data products from public web sources from a Python environment. If you had a gap in your data portfolio because the traditional data vendors don't cover public data, check out Kadoa’s SDK.
EVENTS
Mark Your Calendar
January 21st-23rd, BattleFin AI and Alt Data Conference in Miami