Is Data Hunting Dead?

Author

Matt Ober
September 06, 2023

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Before there were data hunters, there were market data analysts who found new datasets as part of their day job. Is the role of the data hunter dying or is it dead?

In the financial services space, everyone wanted the data hunter role 5 years ago. It was a great way to break into the buy side coming from a data vendor seat or transitioning from an equity research role at a small shop. The Quants invented this position for non-quant hires.

Finding the next hot dataset, that was the game. Anywhere and everywhere. Hedge funds with unlimited budgets for anything that delivers alpha. I still think it exists. The difference is that everyone knows the hedge funds are potential buyers and everyone is realizing that there are certain price buckets that datasets fall into i.e. there are very few datasets selling for north of $1M annually. If I had to guess, the average dataset, which can vary widely, sells for $60k annually in the financial services industry.

So if everyone is trying to sell to hedge funds and financial services firms already, do we need hunters? I think at this point, we likely just need really good data analysts who are able to sift through the noise, test the data themselves, run the negotiation, and make sense of whether there is value in the data.

All that being said, the top 1% of money managers in the world will still have some form of a hunter for the foreseeable future. They are trying to find things before they exist or before they are being sold. They are trying to get exclusivity in some cases. But this is such a small group of companies with such a small amount of seats to fill. My recommendation is if you want to be a data hunter, focus on being a really good data analyst who is personable and keeps up with industry trends and new dataset releases.