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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

#231
post #23

Nothing new here other than satellites. Years ago (1990s?) Peter Lynch - at the time manager of the largest mutual fund followed his daughters into a shopping mall for back to school - his daughters didn't go into GAP stores so he went back to the office and sold as his shared of GAP. His fund beat everyone else by a large margin because GAP stocks dropped a month latter when they announced the earnings drop. This is…

Not even the satellites is new. Bloomberg has has oil tanker tracking for a decade as well as oil field sat images.

Re: Hedge funds use satellite images to beat Wall Street

#232

This was apparently a plot point in Billions. There's market opportunity here. Off the top of my head: 1) Drone photos instead of satellite photos to get at the data cheaper 2) ML counting of cars 3) Some way to legally sense the number of cellphones within a given radius (can possibly be combined with a drone) 4) Simply aiming a network cam at the entrance/exit from across the street and counting the number of peopl…

So all of that already exists and is already widely used. I'm a bit confused as to why this is news considering that this has been going on for quite some time.

Maybe because I'm a pure-software back-end guy who has no idea what the hell institutional investors do in the hardware space to make their targets, because that's not remotely my wheelhouse? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Hedge funds use satellite images to beat Wall Street

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is called front running and is super illegal. Are you sure it's illegal if it's a hedge fund with access to order flow from a third party? "Front running is one of the easiest ways to make money. It's essentially insider trading, except the inside information isn't about corporate activity; the information is about client order flow. In this case, since the index investors are not their clients, it is legal fo…

Funnily enough I've been involved in this argument a number of times on this forum. Front Running is not illegal, order flow can be purchased, and even institutional investors are unable to buy portions of millions of stock in one go. You can theoretically front-run part of that order if your algorithms analysing orders think that a big order is following current ones. People will argue front running is illegal becau…

This isn't classic front running. It's price action prediction based on observed action.
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