Tldr, I think risk and laziness I actually work in a very tenuously related field, and I've seen that their is a reluctance for people whose world is basically

Tldr, I think risk and laziness I actually work in a very tenuously related field, and I've seen that their is a reluctance for people whose world is basically "what you can do on a computer" to actually try and get their hands dirty and get some data themselves, vs continuing to churn over whatever data is already out there- that's the laziness The other important thing is the risk. It's easy to analyze existing dataset X and decide if it has predictive power. Throwing up a network of sattelites or sensors or whatever without clear knowledge that they are going to help is a massive risk that's probably beyond most asset managers. Third, if someone is successfully doing something like what you're mentioning, they would be best served by doing it quietly, so there may be lots of cools stuff happening that we just aren't aware of