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There's a whole marketplace where companies with so-called "Alternative-data" sell their datasets to quant traders. Satellite imagery of farms, passenger traffi
by waterside81 7y ago
There's a whole marketplace where companies with so-called "Alternative-data" sell their datasets to quant traders. Satellite imagery of farms, passenger traffic through airports, all sorts of random, seemingly disparate data.
- floatrock 7y agoThe reason your free weather app asks for your location data isn't for "local weather forecasts". Well, it is, but that's a cost for them. The income comes from keeping that location tracking on all the time and selling which stores and dentists you go to. Someone can link the NYT story from a few months ago when this came to mainstream attention. Hedge funds also fly cesnas over refinery fields to look at the levels of those big tanks you see off the highway... most of them have roofs that move up or down with capacity, and those that don't you look at with an infrared camera to look at relative temperature differences.
- goodfight 7y agoIf anyone is profiting off my location I better get a cut of it haha. It's amazing what they can do and I enjoy data-centric trading strategies but we don't have to violate individual privacy.
- knd775 7y agoSome employees of a credit card company got in trouble for this sort of thing a while ago. They were running queries against customer transactions to figure out sales ahead of earnings calls. For example, they figured out that Chipotle was going to beat expectations and bought a ton of stock just before the earnings call. (This very predictably got the attention of the SEC)
- Thrymr 7y agoPrevious discussion of that event on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8966817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8966817
- oh_sigh 7y agoHow is a free weather app supposed to tell you the local weather without knowing your location?
- thinkingemote 7y agoType in a place name
- short_sells_poo 7y agoAlternative data and analytics providers tend to fall into two categories: 1. They are just trying to ride the ML hype train and they sell effectively polished turds to board member buddies. This is the vast majority of the alt data and analytics firms. They have flashy dashboards and allow you to drag&drop together models and data. The whole thing looks very fancy during the sales pitch. It's all animated and shows charts that impress CEOs. Then when your quants get hold of the data they discover that it's real world predictive power is zero. 2. They actually discover valuable data or build models that genuinely produce an edge on the market. These either turn into hedge funds or are bought by an existing hedge fund to run the model in house. You rarely hear of these because their offering is public only briefly or not at all.
- H8crilA 7y agoI also liked the insurance purchases for Tesla cars: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/02/28/new-data-sources-make-it-harder-for-executives-to-mislead-investors https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/02/28/n...
- shanty 7y agoIs there a service or company that lists this data? I'm curious about what types of data are available.
- waterside81 7y agoYeah check out Eagle Alpha https://eaglealpha.com/ https://eaglealpha.com/
- planteen 7y agoAnother useful piece satellite imagery (other than farms and parking lots already mentioned) is watching shipping lanes in the ocean for traffic.