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What Your Phone is Telling Wall Street (wsj.com)
Your phone knows where you shop, where you work and where you sleep. Hedge funds are very interested in such data, so they are buying it. From a report: When Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said the car maker would work around the clock to boost production of its Model 3 sedan, the number crunchers at Thasos Group decided to watch. They circled Tesla's 370 acres in Fremont, Calif., on an online map, creating a digital corral to isolate smartphone location signals that emanated from within it. Thasos, which leases databases of trillions of geographic coordinates collected by smartphone apps, set its computers to find the pings created at Tesla's factory, then shared the data with its hedge-fund clients [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], showing the overnight shift swelled 30% from June to October.
Last month, many on Wall Street were surprised when Tesla disclosed a rare quarterly profit, the result of Model 3 production that had nearly doubled in three months. Shares shot up 9.1% the next day. Thasos is at the vanguard of companies trying to help traders get ahead of stock moves like that using so-called alternative data. Such suppliers might examine mine slag heaps from outer space, analyze credit-card spending data or sort through construction permits. Thasos's specialty is spewing out of your smartphone.
Thasos gets data from about 1,000 apps, many of which need to know a phone's location to be effective, like those providing weather forecasts, driving directions or the whereabouts of the nearest ATM. Smartphone users, wittingly or not, share their location when they use such apps. Before Thasos gets the data, suppliers scrub it of personally identifiable information, Mr. Skibiski said. It is just time-stamped strings of longitude and latitude. But with more than 100 million phones providing such coordinates, Thasos says it can paint detailed pictures of the ebb and flow of people, and thus their money.
Last month, many on Wall Street were surprised when Tesla disclosed a rare quarterly profit, the result of Model 3 production that had nearly doubled in three months. Shares shot up 9.1% the next day. Thasos is at the vanguard of companies trying to help traders get ahead of stock moves like that using so-called alternative data. Such suppliers might examine mine slag heaps from outer space, analyze credit-card spending data or sort through construction permits. Thasos's specialty is spewing out of your smartphone.
Thasos gets data from about 1,000 apps, many of which need to know a phone's location to be effective, like those providing weather forecasts, driving directions or the whereabouts of the nearest ATM. Smartphone users, wittingly or not, share their location when they use such apps. Before Thasos gets the data, suppliers scrub it of personally identifiable information, Mr. Skibiski said. It is just time-stamped strings of longitude and latitude. But with more than 100 million phones providing such coordinates, Thasos says it can paint detailed pictures of the ebb and flow of people, and thus their money.
There needs to be a OS mod that randomizes location data that apps get within 5 to 10 miles. Only feed the navigation app (if open) the correct data. 5-10 miles should be enough precision for things like weather to work perfectly, while polluting the data streams that app provides sell to third parties.
The smarter nations don't allow their security cleared workers to bring consumer hardware in with them.
:)
What can't be seen from space can now be tracked per worker per shift from the ground.
Who works in an office, who works on the mil/gov production line.
The skilled workers that get the mil production line working after it stops.
What areas of a mil production line still have the most visits by experts.
Wonder what a nations top police, city government officials, mil contractors and mil do all day? Map it out and find out
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The FedEX guy picking up the packages from our company in 1990s said he noted down the number of packages being shipped on the quarter ending evening. He always bought the stock if it showed significant jump over the previous quarter.
For all that talk about these techniques, the day before Tesla announced its third quarter results, real old fashioned bean counting led a very notable short (named Left, some company called Citron) to reverse course and announce publicly he was no longer shorting Tesla. S3 partners calculated that announcement made 1 billion loss for the shorts.
So, yes, novel methods are being discovered. But it is rounding error compared to old fashioned standard research.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We are not most people.
But we still are too dumb to RTFS.
They are NOT using location data from apps. They are just counting cell phone transmissions.
They are just trying to estimate the aggregate number of people in the factory, to see if they are really working late to ship product.
Similar tactics have been used in the past. For instance, when satellite images first went on-line, hedge funds developed software to count cars in mall parking lots. This put them weeks ahead of other investors that were waiting for the Fed to release data based on retail surveys.
Another tactic is to photograph cargo ships entering and leaving port. If they sit high in the water, that means many of the containers are going back empty, and the trade deficit is more likely to widen, which means a weaker dollar.