#custody--trading

#custody--trading

"The current administration has signaled that it is very pro-business and wants to make it as easy as possible for these new fintech business models such as prediction markets and crypto to operate."

Hedge funds and other money managers spent $2.8 billion on alternative data in 2025, according to a new report from consultancy Neudata, a 17% jump from the year before. It's more than double what asset managers spent on alternative data in 2021, which includes a wide range of non-traditional information sources. The report projects that the total spend on alternative datasets could jump to more than $23 billion in the consultancy's bull case in 2030 and just under $8 billion in the bear case.

Competition for top quant talent has never been stiffer. With top hedge funds and high-frequency trading firms in expansion mode - and increasingly encroaching on the same turf - the mathematicians, physicists, data scientists, and engineers who power them are in high demand. The emergence of AI labs, which can outbid even the top-tier finance firms with war chests of tens of billions in capital, has only ratcheted up the competition.