New-fangled research, the type typically not provided by Wall Street firms, is fast becoming the darling of hedge funds. Reuters reports that hedge funds are opting for the quantitative analysis provided by Majestic Research because it's more accurate and therefore gives them a "proprietary edge" over the competition. The 4-year-old New York firm is finding followers with its web-scraping techniques that yield sales and other type of information that seem to make obsolete the old-fashioned researcher¹s way of talking to company executives, visiting malls and the like to identify retail trends and make forecasts.

"It's really been an invaluable service," Isabelle Fymat of hedge fund Crosslink Capital told Reuters, adding that Majestic's data are "a lot more reliable information on what is driving or hurting revenues." Providing raw data rather than opinion, harvested and produced by an army of statistical brainiacs, may be just what the hedge fund ordered. "It's not 100% accurate," says Fymat in her Reuters interview, "but historically they have been very very close. And it¹s way better than Wall Street research" -- which, as we all know, is only a shadow of its former self following some legal hanky-panky of years gone by.