A Good Idea?

Question

What if I built a system that correlates ADS-B tracking of helicopters around Wall Street and the major news stories, then compared that with historical trends. Using this data to predict what big moves/problems could be coming? Obviously this would miss smaller things, but could be useful for off-hours sensitive meetings. Almost like the Twitter sentiment tracker, but for the Wall Street executives.No idea if this would work. Good idea?

zinglersen · Accepted Answer

The thinking is good but no one can verify the idea for you.
Travel data is an interesting data point for a lot of financial analysis, just to name a few:
- Hedge funds are tracking private jets to find the next-megadeal.
- Hedge funds are tracking frequency of delivery trucks going in and out of factories.
- Hedge funds are analyzing satellite images of parking spots outside of Walmart.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-02/hedge-fun...

thebenedict · Answer

I did light research into a similar idea, and got stuck linking aircraft registration numbers from ADS-B to businesses. Many aircraft owned by corporations and high net worth individuals are registered to subsidiaries or holding companies. I wasn't able to follow the chain of registrations through opencorporates.com.I probably didn't exhaust all possibilities -- wonder if this is a solved problem.

xsmasher · Answer

Reminds me of the Washington Pizza Index: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clint...

hmitrea · Answer

Really unique idea , love the concept. Could be a fun bot that could do that. Looking at https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ you see some helicopters downtown Manhattan

sjg007 · Answer

You won't know until you do the analysis but given Zoom and conference calls I suspect that the majority of these things happen remotely.

keiferski · Answer

This is sort of a plot point in the TV show Billions. IIRC, they track private jets and figure out that one company is about to acquire another.

runjake · Answer

I don&rsquo;t know.I&rsquo;d have to see an MVP, first. Build one.This isn&rsquo;t meant as a smarmy answer &mdash; I&rsquo;d be in the target market, but I can&rsquo;t give you a useful answer with nothing but an idea.

Nextgrid · Answer

I wouldn't be surprised if it's already done.

d--b · Answer

My thought is that by the time helicopters patterns are significantly disturbed, the news is already out.

smileysteve · Answer

I used to live across the street from a federal reserve branch. Correlation was not causation.

darkhorn · Answer

Can't you get historical flight records from flightradar24.com?