A staggering 84.1% of all Polymarket traders are currently in the red, revealing a significant gap between market hype and actual earnings. High-profile wins are extreme outliers, with only 2% of users accumulating more than $1,000 in total profit.
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.
A new study analyzing data from 1990 to 2023 found that AI can predict 71% of mutual fund managers' trade directions. The research suggests that thousands of high-paying finance jobs could become automated. The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked at the $54 trillion asset management industry and discovered that senior managers in less competitive categories are the most predictable-and thus the most replaceable.
Data science and artificial intelligence are fundamentally redefining what constitutes skill in investment management, shifting the sources of sustainable competitive advantage in ways most firms have yet to comprehend. This is not about automating existing workflows. It is about reconceptualizing which analytical tasks can be systematized and which genuinely require human judgment, then rebuilding investment processes around that distinction. Firms that fail to recognize this depth are not simply adopting tools more slowly. They are misunderstanding the nature of the change itself.
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.