Were you stuck in traffic this morning?
We sure were. Our usual 20-minute commute to the office took more than an hour.
Traffic like that gives you time to think. Not just about ‘what did we do to deserve this?’ and ‘how can we get around this?’…but more usefully, ‘what can we do next time to avoid this?’
Imagine a live satellite feed on your phone that revealed traffic jams in real time. That kind of data would save more than your morning minutes…it would benefit society.
We’re sure real-time aerial traffic updates will reach our smartphones in the near future, because the same tech is already driving an exciting, experimental branch of finance. Soon, eyes in the sky could help you intercept big gains on the stock market…
Free Reports:
Get Our Free Metatrader 4 Indicators - Put Our Free MetaTrader 4 Custom Indicators on your charts when you join our Weekly Newsletter
Get our Weekly Commitment of Traders Reports - See where the biggest traders (Hedge Funds and Commercial Hedgers) are positioned in the futures markets on a weekly basis.
Professional stock traders spend their lives searching for even the smallest edge over the market.
We saw it in sharp detail during our years on the trading floor in London. It can come from a new economic indicator, an observation from a customer or a fresh piece of insight from an industry expert. The biggest-hitting share traders will step away from their screens and give you their undivided attention if they think you can tell them something they don’t know about a stock.
Wise investors highly prize snippets of information that aren’t widely available. And the relentless march of technology is making new, exotic snippets of potentially market-moving data available.
Start-up companies are finding market-moving data by analysing obscure data sets. Their work is revealing new buy-and-sell signals to fund managers from sources as diverse as satellite imagery and social media.
The rise of computing power lets smart companies crunch ‘big data’ — billions of gigabytes of photos, tweets and other crowd-sourced info — to dig needles of price-sensitive news out of the haystack.
Sometimes the news comes as slowly as watching paint dry — it’s just hard to find. But that hasn’t stopped Orbital Insight Inc, a start-up founded by a former Google Inc [NASDAQ:GOOG] engineer. Orbital Insight studies satellite images of construction sites in 30 Chinese cities. The changing shadows of buildings on those sites can provide a glimpse into whether China’s boom is speeding up or slowing down.
Professional money managers know they have to take official Chinese economic data with a grain of salt. But this kind of info is hard to fake. This kind of service could give traders an edge.
But this wizardry can divine more than the macro trends. It could help you decide whether to buy or sell an Australian stock minutes before the market moves…
Wall Street’s secret weapon
Three former Yale University roommates founded Dataminr Inc in 2009. Dataminr combs through 500 million tweets each day to find market-moving news before it hits the wires.
It weeds out spam and applies its ‘secret sauce’ — a complex algorithm — to determine what news might move the markets.
Dataminr is already saving people money. On Tuesday 2 September, independent journalist Brian Krebs tweeted a negative opinion about Home Depot Inc [NYSE:HD]. Dataminr identified Krebs’ tweet as a ‘notable signal’. The company alerted its fund manager clients a full 15 minutes before the story hit the financial wires…and helped them avoid a 2% decline in the stock price.
Source: Wall Street Journal
The smart money on Wall Street is treating these services as a secret weapon. But the weapon won’t stay secret for long…
How you could benefit
Very few of us have the time and skill to sift through mountains of data for nuggets of golden information. But the growth of this tech shows that we won’t have to. Crunching ‘big data’ for trading signals is real and already happening.
Gleaning buy signals from the shadows of half-finished Chinese buildings is still an experimental art. But applying algorithms to improve your trading is far more developed. For years now, brainy traders have read between the lines of the market, using maths to scoop million-dollar profits.
Our newest colleague at Port Phillip Publishing, Jason McIntosh, plied that trade in his previous life. That is, before he retired rich at the age of 37.
We’ve just coaxed Jason out of retirement to launch a new service that harnesses the power of ‘algo trading’. He’s honed this method for decades. And now Jason is making his market understanding and trader’s knowledge available to you.
All you need to play along is a genuine curiosity about what drives stock prices, and a willingness to let trends work in your favour.
Go here to find out more about what Jason’s trading service offers. You’ll find out what’s so special about this opportunity — and why it could be the best trade alert service to ever launch in Australia.
Cheers,
Tim Dohrmann,
Editor, Money Morning
The post How You Could Turn ‘Big Data’ into Big Stock Market Profits appeared first on Stock Market News, Finance and Investments | Money Morning Australia.
