A good example of real-world application of the donut-receipts idea above is the German Tank Problem[0] from WW2.
Chartering fast ships is from 1790, see e.g.: http://dewinforex.com/forex-basics/high-frequency-trading-fi...
Can't find the link for the donut investor, but I'm pretty sure it was somewhere in Matt Levine's (highly recommended) Money Stuff column.
Sat imagery of parking lots appears all the time in Matt Levine's column, there is a company selling this data to hedge funds today.
Selling pounds is of course George Soros, probably the most famous story in Finance.
Wikipedia claims the Rotschild story about the Napoleonic wars is fake. I read it on Quora here: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-shrewdest-smartest-maneuver-...
An aside, changing order number to a hash value can be a huge pain in a manufacturing environment when people have (mis)used it to for a variety of purposes beyond order identification.