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Comment by sweeneyrod | Hacker News Reader

We know from this case https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-01-23/capita... of insider trading based on spending data at Capital One that such data would be extremely valuable. But it sounds like it would probably be illegal because merchants wouldn't agree to let their data be used like that.

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I don’t see why merchants would have any choice, the payment networks hold the cards and they themselves sell it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an...

Retailers may sell data (via payment networks) to Google so the latter can use it for their advertising business, but it seems (at least to Matt Levine in the article I linked) that they can't/won't sell it to hedge funds to trade on:

> does that mean that Capital One was allowed to trade on this data for its own profit? Wouldn't that be amazing? Surely the answer is no: I assume that Capital One signed agreements with retailers (or rather, with Visa and MasterCard, which signed agreements with retailers) in which it promised not to disclose transaction data, or use it for nefarious purposes.

If you think about it this makes sense. A retailer selling material non-public information to a hedge fund which then trades on it is essentially the same as them executing trades based on the data via the fund, which is obviously insider trading.

No, I don’t think that’s correct. “Selling” data is typically enough to make it “public” (i.e. it’s dissemination), after all most financial data isn’t available for free (e.g. stock prices).

That can't be right, otherwise a CEO could "sell" their revenue figures to a golf buddy who then trades on them. Possibly allowing a reasonably broad set of people to buy the data is enough, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.

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