A Visual Map of Alternative-Data Research

Alternative-data research asks what non-price information is worth, and its history is a decay chronicle: each source (news tone, tweets, search volume) earns until it’s crowded. The current wave is LLM-extracted signals, which adds a new failure mode — training-cutoff leakage — to the old ones. Every branch below should be read with the decay clock in mind: publication date is a feature, not metadata.

  flowchart TD
  ROOT["Alternative-Data Research<br>821 papers"]
  ROOT --> S0["News & sentiment<br>246 papers"]
  ROOT --> S1["Social & attention data<br>33 papers"]
  ROOT --> S2["LLM-extracted signals<br>343 papers"]
  ROOT --> S3["Earnings calls & filings<br>11 papers"]
  ROOT --> S4["Novel sources<br>6 papers"]

821 papers mapped · ranked by rigor-weighted score · regenerated automatically as the daily pipeline scores new papers.

News & sentiment

The original alternative data: tone, coverage, and reaction.

• Returns and Order Flow Imbalances: Intraday Dynamics and Macroeconomic News Effects — Holy Grail, rigor 9.0
• Exact Phase-Type Point Processes for Certified Measurement and Prediction of Event Streams — Holy Grail, rigor 8.0
• HODL Strategy or Fantasy? 480 Million Crypto Market Simulations and the Macro-Sentiment Effect — Holy Grail, rigor 9.0
• Transformer-based CoVaR: Systemic Risk in Textual Information — Holy Grail, rigor 8.5
• Integrating Large Language Models and Reinforcement Learning for Sentiment-Driven Quantitative Trading — Holy Grail, rigor 8.5
• Deep g-Pricing for CSI 300 Index Options with Volatility Trajectories and Market Sentiment — Holy Grail, rigor 8.5
• …and 240 more in the news & sentiment area

Social & attention data

Tweets, boards, and search as attention proxies.

• Quantum Adaptive Self-Attention for Financial Rebalancing: An Empirical Study on Automated Market Makers in Decentralized Finance — Holy Grail, rigor 9.0
• Uni-FinLLM: A Unified Multimodal Large Language Model with Modular Task Heads for Micro-Level Stock Prediction and Macro-Level Systemic Risk Assessment — Holy Grail, rigor 8.5
• More Mentions, Less Information? Diagnosing Identity and Alignment in Reddit Embeddings for Volatility Forecasting — Holy Grail, rigor 9.0
• Decision-informed Neural Networks with Large Language Model Integration for Portfolio Optimization — Holy Grail, rigor 6.0
• Economic uncertainty and exchange rates linkage revisited: modelling tail dependence with high frequency data — Holy Grail, rigor 7.0
• RiskLabs: Predicting Financial Risk Using Large Language Model based on Multimodal and Multi-Sources Data — Holy Grail, rigor 7.0
• …and 27 more in the social & attention data area

LLM-extracted signals

Language models as feature extractors — the current wave.

• Kronos: A Foundation Model for the Language of Financial Markets — Holy Grail, rigor 9.0
• A Hybrid Architecture for Options Wheel Strategy Decisions: LLM-Generated Bayesian Networks for Transparent Trading — Holy Grail, rigor 9.0
• Hybrid LLM and Higher-Order Quantum Approximate Optimization for CSA Collateral Management — Holy Grail, rigor 7.5
• Target alignment, dilution and forecast selection when cross-sectional forecasts share a common target — Holy Grail, rigor 7.5
• Predicting Liquidity-Aware Bond Yields using Causal GANs and Deep Reinforcement Learning with LLM Evaluation — Holy Grail, rigor 8.0
• AlphaRLM: Aligning Language Models for Literature-Grounded Symbolic Factor Discovery — Holy Grail, rigor 8.0
• …and 337 more in the llm-extracted signals area

Earnings calls & filings

Structured corporate text and what leaks through it.

• When Does “Post-Call” Begin? An Availability Contract for Earnings-Call NLP Benchmarks — Holy Grail, rigor 8.0
• Explainable AI for Comprehensive Risk Assessment for Financial Reports: A Lightweight Hierarchical Transformer Network Approach — Street Traders, rigor 8.5
• AMA-LSTM: Pioneering Robust and Fair Financial Audio Analysis for Stock Volatility Prediction — Holy Grail, rigor 7.0
• The Strategic Gap: How AI-Driven Timing and Complexity Shape Investor Trust in the Age of Digital Agents — Street Traders, rigor 7.5
• The Acoustic Camouflage Phenomenon: Re-evaluating Speech Features for Financial Risk Prediction — Street Traders, rigor 7.0
• Cyber risk and the cross-section of stock returns — Street Traders, rigor 6.0
• …and 5 more in the earnings calls & filings area

Novel sources

Satellites, transactions, and everything stranger.

• CaT-GNN: Enhancing Credit Card Fraud Detection via Causal Temporal Graph Neural Networks — Holy Grail, rigor 8.0
• Neural and Time-Series Approaches for Pricing Weather Derivatives: Performance and Regime Adaptation Using Satellite Data — Holy Grail, rigor 7.0
• Thailand Asset Value Estimation Using Aerial or Satellite Imagery — Holy Grail, rigor 7.0
• TIMeSynC: Temporal Intent Modelling with Synchronized Context Encodings for Financial Service Applications — Street Traders, rigor 6.5
• Managing Basis Risks in Weather Parametric Insurance: A Quantitative Study of Diversification and Key Influencing Factors — Street Traders, rigor 5.0
• Feasibility-First Satellite Integration in Robust Portfolio Architectures — Lab Rats, rigor 2.0

Evaluation lens for this field: see the guides index · Full hub: /topics/nlp-llm/