Using satellite images to monitor parking lots, cargo ships. Maybe some satellites might be tracking how many trucks leave Apple factories in China.
Sometimes it's just good old illegal insider information.
Sometimes it's just good old illegal insider information.
I say “simply” because it doesn’t require any of the infrastructure you mentioned, which is what the public typically associates with “alternative data.” It was actually quite impressive and novel at the time, and inspired other projects of mine.
I can talk about this now because (to my knowledge) it no longer works, though it did for a while. He was in charge of approximately $100M when he was working on this.