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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Nothing new here other than satellites. Years ago (1990s?) Peter Lynch - at the time manager of the largest mutual fund followed his daughters into a shopping mall for back to school - his daughters didn't go into GAP stores so he went back to the office and sold as his shared of GAP. His fund beat everyone else by a large margin because GAP stocks dropped a month latter when they announced the earnings drop.

This is better of course, but nothing you can't do in some other way with a little work.

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Was going to make the same comment. I remember Peter talking about how he used foot traffic at the mall to size up retailers he was looking at back in the early 90's. These were interviews on channels like CNBC, so pretty widely watched by retail investors.

All the satellites do is automate the work and I'm pretty sure hedge funds have been using satellite pics for well over a decade now. (I recall reading about the parking lot use case pre-2010) So really all that's changed is that they're now using ML to automate most of the work that analysts used to do manually.

They've been using ML to automate most of that work for at least five years.

> This is better of course, but nothing you can't do in some other way with a little work.

I worked at one of the companies doing machine learning on top of large quantities of satellite imagery and selling the results.

It's more than a little work; it's pretty challenging, in a variety of ways. Just the training aspect is surprisingly difficult to get right.

Where did you get this anecdote from? Googled it, couldn't find anything

Similar story from 1993

"Some of Mr. Lynch's best picks came from watching his three teen-age daughters shop at a nearby mall,..."

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1993-03-09-19930680...

His book, One Up On Wall Street, references this idea of using casual observations to find undervalued stocks. You might find that interesting to look through.

His Book "One up on Wall Street". (which others have mentioned.)

Not even the satellites is new. Bloomberg has has oil tanker tracking for a decade as well as oil field sat images.

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