3 ms·

whoa. insanely cool. Given the market penetration that visa has, they'd get data that's fairly representative of the US (or world?) spending habits and i'd assu

whoa. insanely cool. Given the market penetration that visa has, they'd get data that's fairly representative of the US (or world?) spending habits and i'd assume it'd be HUGELY effective. I doubt that they do it, and if that became public knowledge I have to imagine they'd come under some serious fire, but I don't think its illegal. The notion of running a credit card company basically for free as a way to get information about the economy and made MUCH more profitable trades in the financial markets really appeals to me. Friend of mine has been working on using google trends/blogs as such an indicator, but its a lot harder to tease tradable information out of that sort of data.

kurtosis 17y ago
Yeah it sounds cool - I don't know that this is real just a rumor. A lot of things that sound cool turn out to have serious problems. I saw something on here a while about a "marketplace for data" - I can't remember what it was called - but it make me wonder how one would determine the price for a data feed or open source intelligence - it seems that a fair price for a data stream should be how much of a profit you can make by trading against people who don't have access to the data. But it seems to me that if monitoring revenues of retailers was a really big advantage you could do almost as well by conducting a small well designed survey like the FED does. VISA's volume of data is probably deep into large N range of the sigma/sqrt(N) sampling error.
- Tuna-Fish 17y ago
  As actual moves on retail chains are probably quite small on a quarter-by-quarter basis, to be able to make any kind of money on this kind of information you have to be levered up to your ears. Which also means that if you are wrong, you are going to lose a lot of money. Getting that error probability way way down is a priority.

kurtosis 17y ago

Yeah it sounds cool - I don't know that this is real just a rumor. A lot of things that sound cool turn out to have serious problems. I saw something on here a while about a "marketplace for data" - I can't remember what it was called - but it make me wonder how one would determine the price for a data feed or open source intelligence - it seems that a fair price for a data stream should be how much of a profit you can make by trading against people who don't have access to the data. But it seems to me that if monitoring revenues of retailers was a really big advantage you could do almost as well by conducting a small well designed survey like the FED does. VISA's volume of data is probably deep into large N range of the sigma/sqrt(N) sampling error.

Tuna-Fish 17y ago
As actual moves on retail chains are probably quite small on a quarter-by-quarter basis, to be able to make any kind of money on this kind of information you have to be levered up to your ears. Which also means that if you are wrong, you are going to lose a lot of money. Getting that error probability way way down is a priority.