> Investors are using real-time satellite images to predict retailers’ sales. Is that cheating?<p>This is no more "cheating" than using any other pseudo-publicly available sources of information, such as credit card purchase data, yelp/foursquare/FB checkins, or whatever. It's entirely legal in the same way sitting outside Macy's and counting the number of people who enter and leave through the public entrances.
It's not cheating, but it gives one a perspective on just how far humanity can go in figuring out ways some humans can get an advantage over other humans in a silly, arbitrary, zero-sum PvP game we've somehow evolved.<p>I know that's unfair. But the way I feel, there's lots of absurdity in this. In a more reasonable world, if you wanted to know when some CEO is leaving on vacation, you'd just <i>ask them</i>. You wouldn't have to spy on them with a satellite.
"Why you should buy index funds, Exhibit 494920".<p>It's not cheating, but it's something you probably can't compete against, so you shouldn't try.
There's a strong case for firms to publish more and higher quality data now the web makes it easy. Forget sattelite images use carpark stats from entry and exit and so on. Many of these equity analysts will do your job of analysing the data for you giving you a bigger lead on a developing problem or strategy failure allowing for sooner correction. On the flip side, earlier notice of strategy success for quicker ramp up decisions.<p>"Yes but we do more sophisticated data analysis anyway" - firstly, I call BS on that CEO & management career self-marketing and secondly, if I'm wrong and it's already being done at an excellent level there is nothing to fear putting it out there - you can spank analysts doing a shoddy job with hard analysis scotching undeserved "impression, zeitgeist and rumour" based negative market sentiment.<p>Of course every board of directors should have an IT committee and a data committee to go with the audit committee with a similarly highly qualified chair of those comittees. It's basically unthinkable not to have a very qualified accountant on the board. Should be the same for IT and Data - although IBM Global Services, Accenture, Oracle etc etc will campaign heavily against having people who know what they're doing on the board!<p>Chair of the data committee would be a crucial figure in earnings calls and so on - they better know their stats!
Using Foursquare data seems easier to me. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14052444" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14052444</a>
Investment idea: build a bunch of projectors that fool orbiting satellites into reading empty parking lots as full, then short retailers’ stocks at earnings time, knowing that all the big smart money will be on the other side.