Yeah it sounds cool - I don't know that this is real just a rumor. A lot of things that sound cool turn out to have serious problems.
I saw something on here a while about a "marketplace for data" - I can't remember what it was called - but it make me wonder how one would determine the price for a data feed or open source intelligence - it seems that a fair price for a data stream should be how much of a profit you can make by trading against people who don't have access to the data.
But it seems to me that if monitoring revenues of retailers was a really big advantage you could do almost as well by conducting a small well designed survey like the FED does. VISA's volume of data is probably deep into large N range of the sigma/sqrt(N) sampling error.
As actual moves on retail chains are probably quite small on a quarter-by-quarter basis, to be able to make any kind of money on this kind of information you have to be levered up to your ears. Which also means that if you are wrong, you are going to lose a lot of money. Getting that error probability way way down is a priority.
I saw something on here a while about a "marketplace for data" - I can't remember what it was called - but it make me wonder how one would determine the price for a data feed or open source intelligence - it seems that a fair price for a data stream should be how much of a profit you can make by trading against people who don't have access to the data.
But it seems to me that if monitoring revenues of retailers was a really big advantage you could do almost as well by conducting a small well designed survey like the FED does. VISA's volume of data is probably deep into large N range of the sigma/sqrt(N) sampling error.