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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 traffic through airports, all sorts of random, seemingly disparate data.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/02/28/n...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is nothing at all wrong wit this, especially because it means that in the end we all get more accurately priced securities. I believe the counter argument is only people with enough wealth to afford an account at one of these hedge funds gains an immediate advantage here. So it's yet another way "the rich get richer." Doesn't bother me, but I can see why other people would have a problem with it. And I severe…
> And I severely doubt more than 5% of the planet cares about whether "in the end we all get more accurately priced securities." Accurately priced securities are like a responsive public health system or redundancy in the electricity grid. Almost nobody cares about these things directly. Yet virtually everybody enjoys the enormous gains in material living standards that are facilitated by having these things in place…
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…
I wonder if stuff like this is ever a form of parallel construction for insider trading. It sounds cool - so maybe it passes the sniff test and avoids further scrutiny?
Also, there are armies of vendors selling all kinds of data to hedge funds, the satellite data providers are just good at getting splashy articles written.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps an analogy would help. Suppose you are giving a prize for someone who guesses how many eggs you eat in the morning. If I watch you checkout at the grocery store and based on the number of eggs you buy, guess that you eat 2 eggs a day, and win the prize, that is not theft. If however your chef who prepares you breakfast every morning “guesses” you eat 2 eggs, then that would be problematic.
According to OP, insider trading is about theft, not fairness. Given that, how is it problematic for the chef in your analogy to guess? They're not stealing, they're just acting in ways most people would consider unfair.
If the chef working in your restaurant sells a cake he made there and puts the money in his pocket instead of yours, that's theft. It's legal to sell cakes the chef made, it's just the the resulting value belongs to the employer and not to the chef personally.
If the chef working in your restaurant sells some of the cooking ingredients and puts the money in his pocket instead of yours, that's theft. It's legal to sell spare cooking ingredients from a kitchen, it's just that the resulting value belongs to the employer.
And in the exact same manner, if the chef working in your restaurant sells the customer order statistics (e.g. how many eggs were eaten) and puts the money in his pocket instead of yours, that's theft. It's legal to sell customer order stats, it's just that as far as those stats have value, that value belongs to the employer and not to the chef personally.
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…
the article is exactly right to present the professors’ opinion as-is.
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…
i think we read very different articles. the one i read is pure journalism. news without taking a side. the position of the professors is probably as you describe — feeling butthurt — but it’s not this article’s job to take a position. it isn’t an editorial. the article is exactly right to present the professors’ opinion as-is.
I think it's incumbent on good journalists to put the views of the people they interview in the proper context. If the subject of an article says something wrong, and the article fails to point that out, it is a lie of omission.