Built over forty years to help people make better decisions. Owned by the people who build it.
Three companies, four decades, one platform.
Northfield brought factor risk methodology out of academia and into commercial practice beginning in 1985 — analytical frameworks now in use at the world's most demanding institutions.
OpenFinance built the first commercial semantic data model for finance. Today that system, PAIX, services over $4T in AUM, and the people, securities, organizations, and markets behind them.
Market76, founded in 2009, patented the technology that turns information and analytics into automated, personalized investment decisions.
The three have worked together for nearly a decade, under a shared commitment to helping people make better decisions. ALPHA represents the highest level of that commitment: a single platform delivering the three organizations' best science, information, alignment, applications, and service — with laser focus on helping users pursue alpha.
ALPHA's Northfield labs sit at the edge of Harvard Yard in the heart of Cambridge, MA. Our other offices — New Haven, New York, Chicago, London — stand astride the world's greatest universities.
Science does not advance in a vacuum. Risk analysis scales through collaboration. Since its launch in 1985, Northfield has invested its focus, capital, and strategy in fostering the dialog between researchers, practitioners, and markets. We do not stockpile white papers and chase empty statistics. ALPHA | Northfield systematically pursues our promise to help people make better decisions.
For decades we have opened our minds, products (Open Optimizer, OpenFinance), research, data, and offices to the broader intellectual pursuit. The Journal of Asset Management is edited from ALPHA's Northfield labs. We sponsor the IAQF/Northfield Financial Analyst of the Year Award. We host regular salons and visiting scholars, and share data, systems, and ideas.
Our philosophy has always been to apply the best minds, mindset, and resources to the common effort to solve the biggest problems. One thousand economists, wearing one thousand pairs of noise-cancelling headphones at one thousand MacBooks, do not ultimately produce The Wealth of Nations.
Our approach is different, deliberate, and central to our mission, culture, and process. We expand our knowledge and product by throwing open our doors, because it is the best thing for our customers, our business, and our world.
Owned by the people who build it.
ALPHA is employee-owned and employee-controlled. We answer to the people who use the tools, not to public markets or institutional private equity.
This is a structural fact, not a slogan. It governs what we work on, how long we work on it, and which customers we choose. The ability to make superior decisions consistently is built over decades and demands complete focus. The institutions that depend on it deserve to know their providers are optimized against one thing: alpha.
The Trust
Some problems are too big or too important to commercialize.
ALPHA helps people and institutions make better decisions. The Trust brings together academic, commercial, and governmental researchers to apply decision science to those problems.
trust.ndalpha.com→