Bloomberg looks at how far oil traders will take it
During hurricane season last year, oil traders were renting boats and counting the tankers arriving and departing Houston. For years, they have been using satellite technology to estimate stockpiles.
The latest scheme is using geolocation data from mobile apps to track worker traffic in refineries in an attempt to identify problems, accidents and maintenance.
"The ability to sharpen a view, or to really gain an edge, based not on anecdotal but more statistically significant signals, is extremely advantageous," Tran said in an interview. "There is an information asymmetry in this market."
It starts in oil but soon big data is going to overwhelm economic data in tracking trends in everything.
Read the story from Bloomberg.
