> Their big break came in mid-2010, when Neil Currie, then an analyst at the investment bank UBS, bought parking-lot counts for 100 representative Walmart stores and published the results in a quarterly earnings preview. The number of cars in the parking lots, he wrote, suggested that Walmart stock was undervalued.

> Currie’s prediction proved correct. As word spread that satellite images were a reliable predictor of corporate profits, a range of investment funds began buying retail-traffic data from RS Metrics.

Many cargo-culting orgs can use this as an example to learn "corelation != causation".

1. Buy shares of X; or bet a high-stake deal with X's board to up the stock price by N percent within a period T. 2. Run some offers/programs - which are intended at the theater - not real revenue. Instead of usual 200 cars a day, store might see 400 a day, sales numbers and volume remaining unchanged 3. Objective achieved; use propaganda marketing to sell the idea to others 4. This ups the stock price anyway - cuz data! 5. Collect bounty from X's board for making good on promise 6. Profit!

The theater might not be as simple as what's seen in this example, but this is exactly what startups in one way or other call "hustle" - and possibly the art of faking it till you make it.