The month of July saw an explosion of activity across the alternative data industry--particularly with many new data product launches and lots of buyside momentum. Here's an in-depth recap of everything you need to know.
News You Can Use
Prada missed the street’s consensus estimates. With all the information out there, is there a way to do better at forecasting a firm’s performance rather than just relying on consensus and sell side research? Alt data is proving its worth by delivering more accuracy. Exabel, the analytics platform consolidating alt data and building insights and models on it, got this one right across 4 different KPIs. Check out their post for more details. Makes us think, can investment professionals afford to ignore alt data signals?
Exabel recently added pass_by to their offerings - a footfall dataset enhanced by hardware sensors - with a strong signal in retail, hospitality and restaurant sector. Check out their detailed report on it.
What’s happening in the LLM world?? We came across this leaderboard that tracks metrics from a user’s standpoint and not just performance. Interesting to see Grok 4 on the top… but for how long?
The Data Corner
Advan put out their monthly insights report in early July with coverage on SFM, AMZN, TSLA, CHWY, SBUX, DVA, PII, GWW, HRL, WYNN/Mgm, PRKS, CMCSA/DIS, and PSA. It was nice to see a healthcare name on it - Davita (DVA) - showing visitation as a good predictor of treatments. What was cool was to see weather, flu seasons and a cyber attack having a negative impact on visitations/treatments.
Aura Intel published a study to surface business trends in the Private Equity space from its workforce analytics platform. A couple of takeaways:
- Private equity hiring surged nearly 5× year-over-year in April 2025, with dramatic spikes closely tied to fund deployment and portfolio milestones—unlike the steady growth seen in the broader market. Top firms like BlackRock, General Catalyst, and TCI drove activity primarily in key financial hubs, but there’s also rising regional activity in states such as Massachusetts and Texas.
- There is a pronounced shift from just hiring investment roles to boosting operational and technical talent. Demand is rapidly growing for Data Scientists, Customer Success Specialists, and operational leaders—highlighting a move toward analytics-driven decision-making and embedded value-creation within portfolio companies, making hiring trends a real-time strategic signal for the industry’s next moves.
SensorTower did a study on growth and customer traction of different LLM chatbots - it was nice to see demographic variations and cross platform usage of users of these different platforms. A more detailed study of the AI apps landscape is also available highlighting how apps are adapting to opportunities and potential threats from AI in their space.
Placer.ai did a study on consumer behavior patterns 5 years from COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on retail, dining entertainment, and office spaces during the first half of 2025 compared to pre-pandemic (2019) and 2024 levels. Key Takeaways:
- Retail and Dining Visits Exceed Pre-Pandemic Levels: Both retail and dining segments saw higher visits in H1 2025 compared to 2019, driven by major expansions from top chains and a consumer emphasis on value-driven and premium options. Consumers increasingly visit multiple chains to find the perfect product rather than relying on one-stop-shops.
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Bifurcation in Consumer Behavior Toward Value and Premium:
There is a distinct split where value-focused retailers like dollar stores and off-price apparel chains have seen significant traffic growth, while mid-market apparel and casual dining suffer declines. Luxury apparel and fine dining segments, however, remain strong or have improved since 2019.
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Office Space Utilization Remains Low Despite Recovery Efforts:
Visits to office buildings nationwide are still 33.3% below 2019 levels, indicating that hybrid and remote work models have permanently reshaped office usage. Although some cities show modest improvements thanks to Return to Office initiatives, the overall recovery in office attendance remains incomplete.
Is there alpha in forward looking statements on earnings calls? Check out Alexandria tech’s research and back test on it - a sharpe of 1.72!!
Lexis Nexus published a report on “GenAI Success in Financial Services”. Firms looking to adopt AI tech in their business will find this report very useful.
Is there a signal, an insight that can be extracted from code repositories? Saw an interesting piece from AnteData showing software security and infrastructure firms, like Akamai, benefitting from the AI boom as reflected in strong developer activity showing demand for fast and secure content delivery. There’s also a significant uptrend in activity for Autodesk and Dassault Systemes driven by changes to trade flows, reshoring, defense manufacturing demand, new types of simulation facilitated by AI productivity improvements.
Wondering what’s happening in the Yogurt category in China? Check out Win Win Networks Hot Topic Analysis for July, 2025.
Interested in the business of Music? Clearscore put out a report on the “Oasis” tour which shows TicketMaster spend index spiking, average transaction value peaking at GBP250, total spend index for food and drink service provider at Wembley is beating Taylor Swift’s Era’s tour. They also published a white paper on ExactOne - a consumer spend dataset,by analysing YoY revenue trends across 3 UK listed firms - a use case that quants might find very interesting.
Data Product Launches
Hatched Analytics: Launches Hatched-IQ - indices based on 70+ prop data feeds and designed for systematic strategies.
Aura Intel launches a conversational AI assistant for its workforce analytics platform making workflows more efficient and accurate for its clients.
Apptopia announces its new Mobile Performance Indices. MPIs are a proprietary blend of deep consumer signals for growth, engagement, and user segmentation, into a single index. A stock's MPI is the only metric you truly need to understand mobile data impact for any public company. Check out these indices in action for UBER, MELI, PTON and WISE.LN.
SensorTower: Analyze gaming performance across mobile, PC and console for a complete cross platform view using Video Game Insights.
BCMstrategy launched a data feed that firms can use to train their AI models on public policy issues and their impact. It’s one of kind feeds that has applications across the financial landscape.
Oxford Data Plan launched 4 new tickers - Dollar General, CVS Group, Cloudfare, JetBlue, Natural Grocers - and added new KPIs for Netflix - Paid Subs (UCAN) - and Roku - Global Platform Revenue.
Finster.AI launched an AI powered screener that removes the constraints of predefined filters and categories. You can use natural language to define your interest list and ideas.
Guideline launched a higher frequency version of its ad spend data. The product reduces lag and provides an early read on shifts in the ad market.
Big Data Federation announces the launch of its “The Financial AI” platform that enables portfolio construction, backtesting and optimization of strategies through an intuitive chat based AI agent.
Repvue announced its Cloud Sales Index which is made up of 246 companies with 47K sales professionals ratings and over 2M data points.provides a pic of sales professionals succeeding and organizations outperforming their peers.
Buy Side News
Equity L/S hedge funds are experiencing significant growth - drawing $10B in first half of 2025 according to a note from HFR. According to data from PivotalPath, Equity L/S delivered 9.2% returns in the same period.
Man Group is reporting a record AUM of $193B at the end of June driven by strong quarterly inflows.
QRT, the Paris based quant fund, is continuing its diversification beyond quant by hiring equity researchers from the sell side.
According to a note from GS, hedge funds reduced their exposure to tech stocks in late July and, according to US government data, increased their bullish positions in gold to the highest level since April.
AQR Capital Management, led by billionaire investor Cliff Asness, has delivered double-digit returns across multiple strategies in the first half of 2025, including an 11.4% gain at the firm's flagship Apex multi-strategy hedge fund. ➜
Ken Griffin’s $66bn multi-strategy hedge fund major Citadel posted a modest 2.5% gain in the first half of 2025, falling behind smaller multi-manager rivals Balyasny and ExodusPoint, which returned 7.3% and 9.3%, respectively. ➜
Whetstone Capital, the $250m hedge fund known for its contrarian deep-value approach, posted a 21% return in May – its best monthly performance since inception – by doubling down on bets on unloved and mispriced tech stocks.
Bridgewater Associates’ flagship Pure Alpha fund gained 17% in the first half of 2025, outperforming the broader hedge fund industry amid a volatile macro backdrop, according to an unnamed source familiar with the fund's performance.
Walleye Capital is not accepting new investor capital as the $8B firm focuses on maintaining performance according to a report from Bloomberg.
Merger Arbs (Adage, Citadel, HBK) cashed in on the lucrative event driven play - the closing of Chevron’s acquisition of Hess.
New Silk Road Investment - a long standing Singapore hedge fund - is winding down due to withdrawal of capital by US institutions from Asian markets and declining performance.
University of California’s $190B investment arm has exited hedge funds investments - a move that started in the 2020 crisis.
Jain Global, launched last year with $5.3B in commitments, has lagged other established multi-strats with a 12 month return of just over 2.7% according to a report in the Financial Times.
According to a note from GS, hedge funds are rotating out of financial stocks and into consumer staples.
Quants - Marshall Wace’s TOPS, AQR’s Delphi L/S, Renaissance Institutional Equities each posted approx 11% in H1 2025 capitalizing on the move away from Mag 7 and return to fundamentals.
New Fund Launches
Carrhae Capital - A London based EM hedge fund is preparing to launch with a strategy that excludes China completely - in response to demand from investors from US to cut their exposure - with an expected AUM of $700M.
KR Capital, founded by Ravi Naresh, ex Marshall Wace Partner, is being seeded approx $3B by Millenium to run an equity L/S strategy.
Agave Capital Management Limited, a macro hedge fund, founded by former Citadel PM, is expected to launch with $1B in AUM this year.
Autonomy Capital launches Autonomy Stellar, a L/S fund designed to capitalize on global systemic shifts and price based tech disruption.
Saber Capital - a Zurich based Energy focused firm launched by Steve Barclay with backing from New Holland Capital.
Upcoming Events
BattleFin Data Discovery Day: October 9th, New York, NY; returning this fall! Reserve your spot early and save more.
COLLIDE Data & AI Conference: September 30th - October 1st, Atlanta; data + AI focused.
International Conference on Big Data and Smart Computing: October 30th, New York; big data.
BattleFin Discovery Day London: November 20th, London; alternative data focused.
