How It Works
Two product families. One engagement model.
Market Data signals and WaveCast predictive models — derived from the U.S. securities lending market. Delivered before the open. Evaluated against your own universe before any commitment.
What You Receive
Production-grade signals in your environment every morning.
Each trading day at 7:45 AM EST, Tidal delivers three signal families to your AWS S3 bucket: Volatility, Velocity, and Short Interest. Files are pipe-delimited, ticker-keyed, and structured for direct ingestion into existing risk and alpha workflows.
WaveCast clients receive a per-security file with next-day direction and rate magnitude predictions for the full active special universe, on the same schedule.
Engagement includes the complete methodology documentation behind every signal — pre-specified test designs, event studies, sub-period decompositions, and replication-grade evidence tables. Clients receive direct access to the researchers who built the program, not a sales rep with a script.
Short Interest and Velocity are also available intraday — refreshed every 15 minutes between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM EST — for clients running tighter rebalance windows.
The Three Signal Families
Three independent dimensions of borrowing pressure.
Volatility captures dispersion. Velocity captures rate-of-change. Short Interest captures direction. The three families are nearly orthogonal and most powerful as a system.
Volatility
Dispersion in securities lending rates at the security level. Identifies unstable borrow conditions before they appear in price action.
Velocity
Rate-of-change in lending activity. Force-multiplier on Volatility — securities high on both signals carry materially higher conviction.
Short Interest
Real-time institutional shorting pressure. The strongest single-signal drawdown predictor in Tidal’s research — refreshed intraday.
WaveCast
Next-day direction and rate magnitude predictions for US equity special stocks. You see WaveCast scored against your own inventory before we ask for anything.
How Engagement Works
From evaluation to live delivery in three phases.
Tidal’s engagement process is built for institutional buyers: methodology-first, evidence-grade documentation, direct researcher access at every step.
Evaluation
Methodology walkthrough, sample data files, and direct Q&A with the research team. Your quant or risk team evaluates the signal against your own universe and time period.
Integration
S3 bucket provisioning, file format validation against your ingestion pipeline, and historical backfill delivered. End-to-end testing in your environment.
Live Delivery
Daily delivery at 7:45 AM EST. Direct line to the research team for production questions, signal updates, and ongoing methodology refinement.
Who Tidal Serves
Built for institutional decision-makers.
Tidal’s signals integrate into the workflows of six institutional client types. Each uses the data differently — risk overlay, alpha generation, position sizing, or short-side conviction.
Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds
Deploy Volatility and Short Interest as cross-strategy risk overlays. Velocity adds a momentum dimension to existing factor models.
Long/Short Equity
Use Short Interest in Small/Mid cap for short-side conviction. Use Volatility and Velocity across the book for drawdown risk management.
Quantitative Funds
Integrate raw signal fields as independent factors. Cross-correlations are documented and low — designed for factor-orthogonal portfolio construction.
Prime Brokerage
Distribute Short Interest as a value-add to clients. Use intraday refresh for real-time stress monitoring of borrow inventory.
Risk Management
Use signals as an independent due diligence layer when evaluating manager exposures. Identifies elevated drawdown risk in concentrated positions.
Proprietary Trading
Use intraday Short Interest for short-horizon directional conviction. Volatility and Velocity flag securities entering instability before price action.
What Makes This Different
Three structural advantages over generic alt-data.
Most alt-data providers deliver late, validate lightly, and interpose layers of account management between buyer and researcher. Tidal does the opposite.
Pre-Market Delivery
Data lands in your S3 bucket at 7:45 AM EST — before the open, in time for the day’s positioning decisions. Regulatory short interest is published biweekly with a 14-day lag. Tidal is real-time by comparison.
Validated Like Institutional Research
Every signal is documented across 8.8 million observations, 7,103 securities, and six years of U.S. equity data. Pre-specified test designs, sub-period decompositions, and replication-grade tables — not marketing benchmarks.
Direct Researcher Access
Talk to the people who built the signals — not an account manager. Methodology questions, integration support, and signal updates all flow through the research team directly.
Frequently Asked
Questions buyers ask before they engage.
How do I evaluate the data before committing? +
Tidal provides sample data files covering a representative time window and security universe, along with the complete methodology documentation. Your quant or risk team can replicate the headline findings in your own environment before any commercial commitment. Most evaluation processes take 2-4 weeks.
How long does integration take? +
Once an agreement is in place, technical integration typically takes 1-2 weeks. This includes S3 bucket provisioning, per-client credentials, file format validation against your existing ingestion pipeline, and historical backfill delivery. Tidal’s files use a standard pipe-delimited format that ingests cleanly into most institutional data systems.
What’s the delivery format and cadence? +
Pipe-delimited .TXT files delivered to AWS S3 via per-client credentials. EOD files arrive at 7:45 AM EST each trading day, with intraday refresh available for Short Interest every 15 minutes between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM EST. Three aggregation levels per signal: Security, Sector, Industry. EOD history extends to 2018; intraday from December 2024.
How is Tidal different from regulatory short interest or other alt-data feeds? +
Regulatory short interest is published biweekly with a 14-day reporting lag — stale on arrival. Tidal’s signals are derived from daily lending market transactions and delivered before the open each trading day. Compared to other alt-data providers, Tidal validates every signal across 8.8 million observations and six years of data, provides direct researcher access, and operates in a narrow, deep domain rather than across loosely-related data categories.
Start the evaluation.
Methodology documentation, sample data files, and direct access to the research team.