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Comment by afpx | Hacker News Reader

Hedge funds have been using location data to ‘predict’ corporate earnings for at least 5 years, that I know of. There’s also speculation that they use the data to identify locations of VIPs and where they’re going (by clustering activities of the VIP’s entourage). It’s unfortunate that news organizations as reputable and prominent as the NYT only get on these stories so late in the game. This information would have been more useful to the public back in 2013.

What I don’t understand is why these types of activities by hedge funds aren’t considered insider trading.

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Because the hedge funds are by definition not insiders? They are literally not using non-public corporate data at all.

Insider trading laws don’t exist to make sure there isn’t information assymetry, the market is all about that assymetry. Insider trading laws are about insiders stealing from other shareholders.

Well, it is non-public data. I once spoke with a lawyer to see if I could legally use location data to do the same thing (for instance, it’s easy to correlate changes in activity at certain retailers with quarterly earnings), and I was told it’s risky.

It is not true in the United States, other countries differ: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-03/inside...

Non-public and insider are two different concepts. I could send a satellite to space, take pictures of parking lots, count cars, and it'd be a pretty decent indicator to the relative success of a retailer. Add some other signals into the model and it'd probably be good.

I don't need to give the public access to my satellite images. But if I wanted to make a subscription service for 100k/month, I could. It would be non-public, but not insider.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thestreet.com/amp/story/136...

That's not risky, it's done by tons of funds.

Is it just as legally risky to go to a store with a little mechanical counter and count heads?

> It’s unfortunate that news organizations as reputable and prominent as the NYT only get on these stories so late in the game. This information would have been more useful to the public back in 2013.

It's likely The Times just didn't have enough, or access to, this data to do solid reporting.

If there are people in and out of the industry who are willing to share data that can advance an important story, these things might get out faster.

Interested in these strategies. Is most of the location based data relevant to consumer companies and retail sectors? Trying to think of how hedge funds would apply this location data to other sectors.

I've wanted to use a weather mesh network for a while in commodities and other spaces, but the info has been hard to collect without building a private sensor network.

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