James Siminoff

Wow Analysts that Analyze

Wall Street analysts have always annoyed me.  I am sure there are some exceptions but overall they sit in their vertically stacked caves (offices)  in NYC and make assumptions as to where things are going.  

But then I saw this article via Josh’s twitter.  Analysts are now using sattelite to count cars in the parking lots of Walmart’s to figure out what the next quarter will look like.

Satellite data is interesting as you can now get it in almost real time and you can write programs to look at the data and scrape out info.  

I hope this is a trend that takes off in wall street.  There are a lot of interesting ways to use technology today to figure out what is happening in the economy that unlike the old method might actually be correct.