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Hedge funds use satellite images to beat Wall Street

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Re: Hedge funds use satellite images to beat Wall Street

#11

Post by somebodythere »

nwah1 wrote: post #2

I remember seeing stories about programmers with access to credit card databases getting indicted for trading on the information. This is a legal version of the same thing, and also probably any attempt to make it illegal would be unenforceable.

Unlike the credit card case, these hedge funds are not affiliated with the companies whose stocks they are trading. In addition, the number of cars in a parking lot is not expected to be confidential. They are simply using available tools to make an observation, and using that observation to influence a trading decision.

I see it as just a quantified and scaled up version of, say, noticing more Tesla cars on the street, and choosing to invest. I think making something like that illegal would only be harmful to the stock market and investors.

Re: Hedge funds use satellite images to beat Wall Street

#12

Post by harryh »

This article is very wrong to confuse "material non-public information" with hard to acquire information like counting cars in satellite photos.

Remember the Matt Levine test: insider trading is about theft, not fairness.

When a company insider uses private company information to trade (or colludes with an outside party to do so) they are stealing material non-public information from the company for their own benefit. Nothing of the kind is happening when a hedge fund (or anyone else) acquires and analyzes satellite photos.

There is no expectation of fairness in the stock market. All sorts of people work very hard and spend a lot of money to develop proprietary information in the pursuit of stronger returns. There is nothing at all wrong wit this, especially because it means that in the end we all get more accurately priced securities.

Re: Hedge funds use satellite images to beat Wall Street

#15

Post by lolc »

I find it somewhat interesting to what lengths traders go for profits. Cue people who explain how this makes the markets more efficient.

Something I'm wondering about though: The article makes it sound like this is some new unfair advantage of the big traders. But isn't this an old game? If you can afford to acquire and process the data you're likely going to beat the other participants. That was always true. I don't see what's qualitatively different here. Is there?

Re: Hedge funds use satellite images to beat Wall Street

#16

Post by FanaHOVA »

nwah1 wrote: post #2

I remember seeing stories about programmers with access to credit card databases getting indicted for trading on the information. This is a legal version of the same thing, and also probably any attempt to make it illegal would be unenforceable.

I doubt that actually happened since Second Measure exists.

Re: Hedge funds use satellite images to beat Wall Street

#17

Post by dna_polymerase »

citilife wrote: post #3

I use discussions on the internet... https://projectpiglet.com/ If it's "public" it's fair game for the stock market. My favorite example was the company Quandl[1] which was monitoring charted flight patterns of companies to determine if a company in the area was going to be purchased. [1] https://blog.quandl.com/corporate-aviation-intelligence/airc...

Of course you do. You developed that service. Maybe you should mention that in such posts...

Re: Hedge funds use satellite images to beat Wall Street

#18

Post by client4 »

This article reminds me of tracking corporate jets and seeing if they were doing tarmac M&A talks. There are a lot of interesting opportunities for 'corporate information side-channel' attacks and it would be a great opportunity for a new information based corporation to corral this information and sell it.

Re: Hedge funds use satellite images to beat Wall Street

#19

Post by mc32 »

rococode wrote: post #6

I went to a recruiting talk by Two Sigma a while back where they discussed the same thing as an example of "look at this cool stuff we get to work on". They had slides with satellite images of some parking lot and showed how they could segment cars, deal with car-like things on roofs, map regions of parking lots to the right stores, handle different conditions like snow, etc. From a technical perspective it's actuall…

How do they deal with underground parking in urban areas especially?

Re: Hedge funds use satellite images to beat Wall Street

#20

Post by secabeen »

peteretep wrote: post #9

How is it that Berkeley can't run https on their webservers?!

That site is hosted off-campus, coordinating obtaining the cert from the campus CA and then getting it into their off-campus host is probably just a low-priority. They should still do it, though, being off HTTPS is going to hurt their SEO soon enough.
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