Why Ghost Tech is the cleanest UK alt-data factor
The factor works because UK iXBRL filings are unusually disclosure-rich. Companies House asks every UK private company to declare, at minimum, turnover, average headcount and wages-and-salaries. That gives any analyst three independent inputs to a single ratio (revenue per employee) on the entire population, refreshed every business day, with full historical depth.
What you do with the anomaly depends on your strategy:
- Shell-company detection for compliance and AML teams, we cluster the population by ownership, registered office and directorship overlaps to surface structures of interest.
- Transfer-pricing surveillance for tax-research desks, recurring high-revenue/low-headcount entities owned by overseas parents are a known artefact of intra-group invoicing.
- AI-firm signature detection for venture and growth-equity teams, genuinely AI-leveraged services businesses are starting to dominate the 99th-percentile band, and their financials look unmistakable next to traditional consultancies.
We deliver the feed three ways:
- Daily JSON dump of every entity newly entering the 99th percentile
- Five-year Parquet history for backtesting (no look-ahead bias, point-in-time clean)
- Webhook fired on first crossing for desks running an event-driven strategy
Every record is auditable back to the originating iXBRL filing reference, so research compliance can verify the trigger.