[appleiigs]

Lots of stories like this in finance. In Flash Boys book, it discuss finance firms laying 800 miles of fiber across mountains just for trading. Bloomberg terminal tracks oil tankers. Hedge funds using satellite photos to see how busy shopping malls are. To take that even further, a hedge fund hired hundreds of people to sit in Luckin Coffee stores to track traffic and what customers purchased... on and on.

[schoen]

It feels intuitive that the tanker tracking is relevant to traders, but how would they really use this information? Does the arrival schedule of individual oil tankers really noticeably move energy prices in a particular country or particular region? Like, does crude oil locally get $0.001/gallon or $0.001/barrel cheaper each time a tanker arrives somewhere?

Or is it more like "a storm is delaying 30 tankers' arrival" or "a war is delaying 20 tankers' departure", to understand industry-wide or market-wide patterns?

[ProjectArcturis]

The Luckin one actually identified an enormous fraud.