What do you suspect they are using?
The key is to understand that in some of these problems, data is relatively scarce, and it is really important to quantify uncertainty.
Maximum likelihood estimates are very frequently atypical points in the posterior distribution. It is unsettling to hear people are using this and not computing the entire posterior.
For example, satellite imagery of trucking activity correlated to specific companies or industries.
Its all signal processing at some level, but directly modeling the time series of price or other asset metrics doesn’t have the alpha it may have had decades ago.
You don’t know as much about this as you think