The recent rally off the June 16 lows (S&P 500 +5.36%, Nasdaq +7.57%, Russell 3000 +5.42%) has made some crowded shorts more squeezable. We have seen the number of highly squeezable stocks in our Squeeze metric since June 15 more than double, and our average squeeze score has increased by over 250% (from 12.22 to 31.48). The Consumer Discretionary (primarily auto) and HealthCare (Biotech) sectors have the most constituents in the top 25 most squeezable stocks.

Alternative data is increasingly being used in private markets, including private equity, real estate, credit, and infrastructure, across deal origination, due diligence, and post-acquisition value creation and risk mitigation. Initially, interest in alternative data began when companies wanted additional information around digital market spend comparisons and reputation and social media review comparisons.

Employment data has been the 4th most popular alternative data category on the Eagle Alpha data discovery platform over the past 12 months, seeing a 40% YoY increase in the number of employment datasets onboarded. Job listings data provide asset managers holistic information on total employee count, job functions, skills, gender, and tenure which can then be used to measure firm performance, hiring strategy, employee turnover, headcount growth, and estimate expenses. Employment data can also take the form of employee profiles and company reviews which can help measure employee perception and sentiments, thus providing a good use case not only for firms dealing with public equities but also for private equity in the form of deal origination analysis and due diligence.