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Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries

bloomberg.com

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Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries

#121

Post by anitil »

darkpuma wrote: post #47
sevensor wrote: post #15

I've heard from a friend who used to work in Houston refineries, that it's not unusual for refinery workers (who do carry mobile phones, by the way) to call their brokers immediately when they hear an explosion or see an unexpected plume of smoke from a neighboring refinery. Also smoking on the job is apparently much more common at refineries than I would have expected. Edit: this comment reflects the state of the in…

I once read an argument (maybe here on HN, I'm not sure) that if insider trading were legal, Enron wouldn't have taken anybody by surprise. I'm not sure I buy the argument that it should consequently be legal, but it's an interesting idea.

That's an interesting idea! Finding the 'victim' in insider trading is complicated as well because it is typically someone who would have made a trade but didn't, so how do you know who they are?

There was a Planet Money podcast about this [0] that if I remember correctly said it wasn't even explicitly illegal in the US until relatively recently. It was considered theft to take insider knowledge, but not illegal to trade on it.

[0] I think it's this one: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/12/23/460689797/epis...

Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries

#122

Post by jedberg »

mlevental wrote: post #114
jedberg wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're the oil company you probably don't care one bit if a trader is making money on the price of oil, because it isn't coming out of the oil companies profits. It's coming from other traders.

if that were true they would just publicize their production numbers

They still don't want their competitors to know how well they're doing or their suppliers, who might increase their prices if they know the company is doing well.

Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries

#123

Post by [deleted] »

tantalor wrote: post #51
lolc wrote: post #45

Soooo 1. Generate fake phone profiles of a made-up disaster crew 2. Wait for minor disaster at random refinery 3. Feed trackers with location data showing your fake crew moving into that refinery 4. Repeat 2, 3 to associate your profiles with disaster 5. Short some fine $refinery stock 6. Move your crew to $refinery 7. Profit I wonder whether this has already been pulled off :-)

8. Indicted for fraud

[deleted]

Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries

#124

Post by mateo411 »

lolc wrote: post #45

Soooo 1. Generate fake phone profiles of a made-up disaster crew 2. Wait for minor disaster at random refinery 3. Feed trackers with location data showing your fake crew moving into that refinery 4. Repeat 2, 3 to associate your profiles with disaster 5. Short some fine $refinery stock 6. Move your crew to $refinery 7. Profit I wonder whether this has already been pulled off :-)

That sounds like a great plot for an episode of Billions.

Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries

#125

Post by londons_explore »

djsumdog wrote: post #22
blantonl wrote: post #4

How are they gathering this data? Are they placing detection equipment at/near the target locations to monitor for cell phone signatures in the vicinity, or are they gathering from mobile apps who resell location data to aggregation firms?

Yea that wasn't clear. The article made it sound like they're aggregating data from various sources that collect location data (probably from those app metric providers like Tune and others). So if someone ran an open source phone with F-Droid or just installed zero apps with metrics (and Google isn't one of their sources), they wouldn't ever show up in this data set. I'm guessing location data comes from the Apple/G…

Google and apple done sell data from their location APIs that would be suitable for this.

I reckon it'll be coming from catriers

Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries

#127

Post by ravibala1 »

jedberg wrote: post #94
rando444 wrote: post #85

A clever person could defeat this entire system in a day. If you look at the graph, currently we're talking about a fluctuation of about 7 devices. All you'd have to do is set up a handful of devices (or emulate them and spoof the GPS).. download some sketchy apps, or look for apps that have ties to this company, to bump the location information up. Then turn the devices on or off, so that there's never any change. I…

If you're the oil company you probably don't care one bit if a trader is making money on the price of oil, because it isn't coming out of the oil companies profits. It's coming from other traders.

Almost single major oil company & refinery has a team of traders that directly participate (or use the investment banks / futures brokers) in the crude oil and refined product futures / options markets. This is both for hedging and speculation. If a refinery knows when it's going down for (un)planned, it lets it's traders know and they do trade on that info. In commodities markets, this is legal and does not constitute insider trading.

Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries

#128

Post by simonh »

azernik wrote: post #71
darksaints wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The target firm had a number in their name, kinda like a16z or Office365. The attacking quant knew the target was using iceberg orders which split up and randomize parts of large orders. Attacking quant took a guess at an RNG seed by guessing they used the number in the target firm's name, and then somehow fit the resulting random number stream to order chunk sizes, and was able to confirm they used that number as a…

That... sounds amateurish. Everyone just uses a hardware RNG for random number seeds.

Nowadays yes but I suspect this story is from decades ago, before hardware RNGs and good cryptographically secure algorithms were commonplace.

Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries

#129

Post by Chris2048 »

doovd wrote: post #67
gamblor956 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard that story from a quant friend. However, the way I heard the story, the targeted firm found out about their rival's attempt to game their strategy, and faked a bunch of activity. The rival's algorithm acted on the activity and placed a large market order...in the wrong direction.

This is called spoofing and is illegal.

No it isn't, spoofing is feigning trading behaviour.

Providing data that another company illegitimately bases their trades on isn't trading.

Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries

#130

Post by Chris2048 »

tantalor wrote: post #51
lolc wrote: post #45

Soooo 1. Generate fake phone profiles of a made-up disaster crew 2. Wait for minor disaster at random refinery 3. Feed trackers with location data showing your fake crew moving into that refinery 4. Repeat 2, 3 to associate your profiles with disaster 5. Short some fine $refinery stock 6. Move your crew to $refinery 7. Profit I wonder whether this has already been pulled off :-)

8. Indicted for fraud

You need to be in a position of authority for that. Faking unreliable data isn't fraud - the info you are affecting isn't a recognized metric.
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