Hedge funds use satellite images to beat Wall Street

Berkeley Haas research finds there may be a dark side to the rise of “alternative data” in capital markets

While Assoc. Prof. Panos Patatoukas was discussing Walmart in his Financial Information Analysis course last year, a student brought up the story of how company founder Sam Walton used to count cars in store parking lots to gauge how sales were going. That’s led to a consistently profitable strategy for hedge funds at the expense of individual investors, Patatoukas says: In particular, investors with access to satellite imagery data can get ahead of the rest of the market and target retailers with bad news for the quarter. In that regard, Patatoukas says, the dissemination of the working paper itself will impact the market for satellite parking lot data in the short term, since it provides the first independent analysis showing whether—and how—trading from outer space works.

Source: newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu