[refurb]

Something similar went to court! You can probably google the details and find the actual case.

Guy works at a rail yard, he notices that they are spending a bunch of time doing an inventory of equipment and then a bunch of guys in suits keep visiting. He assumes someone is buying the company, so loads up on stock and so does his family.

Company gets acquired and the SEC charges him with insider trading. I believe he was convicted (nope, went to jury trial), but appealed and won.

His argument was he had no more access to this information than the general public would (say from watching the yard outside the gate).

Edit: found it!

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/two-thoughts-about-the-jur...

Acquitted after a jury trial.

[koolba]

> ... then a bunch of guys in suits keep visiting.

I bet it’d be easy to train an image tracking model to find this off satellite imagery.

[kristjansson]

Welcome to the wonderful world of ‘alternative data’

[blackearl]

You can similarly track certain flights to certain places.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/30/a-corporate-jet-revealed-buf...

[simon--poole]

There was a bunch of analysis over on /r/wallstreetbets a while back based on satellite imagery of roads in China, using them to estimate coronavirus recovery levels for factories there.

[dzhiurgis]

Where do you get up to date satellite imagery?

[DavidPeiffer]

https://www.planet.com/ has 3-5 meter resolution satellite images updated daily for almost all the land surface in the world. Their business model is to launch many lower power and resolution satellite with a few year life rather than launching a few super big and expensive satellite.

Clients can then get historical imagery of a target location to track daily developments (for things like deforestation, crop health, etc.).

[maxerickson]

That's quite different than someone who doesn't work for a company observing something about their product.