A theory i have heard from someone in the hedge fund industry is that this use of "alternative data" is mostly marketing. Investors go to hedge funds for their

A theory i have heard from someone in the hedge fund industry is that this use of "alternative data" is mostly marketing. Investors go to hedge funds for their genius high-alpha proprietary strategies. If you can honestly say that you are feeding tracking of honeybee movements into your model, that makes you seem like far-out geniuses with loads of alpha, so you will attract more investors. For a hedge fund, attracting investors is more important than actually doing good trades. Of course, nobody will say this out loud. This is not to say there are not some genuine users of alt data. Of course there are! But it's not happening at the scale that everyone wants to believe. This is a very similar story to the whole "big data" thing in Main Street businesses.