Nasdaq-owned alt-data seller Quandl just hired BlueMountain's former data buyer to get inside hedge fund clients' heads
- Quandl, the Nasdaq-owned marketplace for alternative data tracking things like web scrapings and satellite images, is bringing in Evan Reich as its new head of data strategy and sourcing.
- Reich previously held the same kind of role, only from a hedge fund client perspective, at $18 billion BlueMountain Capital Management. He will be leading a team tasked with fining new datasets for Quandl to sell.
- Quandl has been focusing more on creating its own data streams instead of just selling other feeds. That comes as Bloomberg and other data giants have started to crowd into the world of alt-data.
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Quandl had a hole, according to its chief executive and founder Tammer Kamel.
The platform has been in the business of selling alternative data - like cell phone-tracked foot traffic and satellite images of shipping barges leaving port - to hedge fund clients. Nasdaq bought Quandl at the end of last year, and now it's eyeing a pivot to actually creating data products in addition to selling others' feeds.
To do that, Kamel needed someone with hands-on experience in using those kinds of data sets to make investment decisions.
In stepped Evan Reich.
Reich is Quandl's new head of data strategy and sourcing. He had the same role, only from the perspective of a hedge fund client instead of a data seller, at $18 billion BlueMountain Capital Management before it was bought by Assured Guaranty earlier this year.
Before his five-year stint at BlueMountain, Reich also worked at Izzy Englander's Millennium and Steve Cohen's SAC Capital, managing the hedge funds' massive data and research reserves. In 2017, according to a release from Quandl, Reich was a contributor to the project that won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics for research on technology used to see gravity waves.
The new job entails sourcing fresh data sets to bring to Quandl's clients, and he's also there to serve as a "sanity check" on new ideas that Kamel and his team come up with.
"His experience is invaluable," Kamel said in an interview with Business Insider. "Evan knows these problems we are trying to solve for clients - he's been living them for his whole career."
The alt-data industry, despite rosy projections of growth and high interest from hedge funds and others, is becoming more competitive thanks to the entry of behemoths like Bloomberg, S&P, and Refinitiv. Long-time alt data player Thasos recently laid off a majority of its staff and its CEO resigned.
Kamel has been vocal about remaining ahead of the curve to ensure his company does not get squeezed.
He told Business Insider in a previous interview that Quandl was going to focus on generating more proprietary datasets as well licensing exclusive datasets that clients will only be able to get from his platform.
"I like to think it's us staying ahead of the curve," Kamel had said then. "We were one of the pioneers in this space ... For us to continue in a leadership position, we've got to be on to the next thing."
Reich's addition brings in a voice that can help judge whether an exclusive data agreement with a vendor will be something that interests the hedge fund clients Quandl relies on.
The transition from hedge fund to data aggregator is not a well-worn career path, and Reich said he was drawn to Quandl in part because of the Nasdaq acquisition. He said the opportunity is "so much greater now" for the firm to lead and innovate in the space because of that institutional backing.
Quandl is "unique in the world, having this sort of platform to find things and bring them to market - it's really an extension of what I was already doing," Reich said.