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What do hedge funds do with location data?

• hogFeast 5y ago
  Footfall for retail, property, also could be useful with commodities. But they have other data: they have your bills, emails, app usage data...again, not sure how legal it is or whether some of this isn't hacked data (App Annie is a, presumably, legal source...but there are far more).
• bunabhucan 5y ago
  Speculation but they could geofence individual home addresses and stores and generate a list of customers/employees, use the phone locations at 3am to get home addresses and the location during business hours to predict whether (say) Walmart traffic was up or down vs Target. They could also figure out who works at Walmart/Target and track shift hours, headcount etc. and predict earnings.
• klabb3 5y ago
  https://www.unacast.com/post/hedge-fund-location-data https://www.unacast.com/post/hedge-fund-location-data > Modeling consumer behavior and forecasting future financial performance based on foot traffic and POI data; > Evaluating and managing real estate asset portfolios based on migration patterns; > Conducting trade area analysis for new investment opportunities; > Leveraging property-level insights to build more specific insurance risk assessments; and > Assessing sector and competitor performance. Note that this is the words of the data broker itself. This one in particular doesn't appear to sell individual data, but rather aggregates by age/county/census group/income etc. It appears as most of their source data is mobile/app based. I'd not be surprised if fraud is common among data miners and brokers - it'd be easy to inflate numbers in order to make more $. Feeding the data miners with fake data would probably be relatively easy to pull off - say you just bought a house in a remote area and you want some new shops to open and the price of your house to go up..