Aaaaaah man, here's a story @Undisciplined will love.
So, there are a few famous meta-data indicators around political-financial events: taxi rides between large NYC banks and the New York Fed building, for instance. (here and here)
Another, that was in the news recently with the Israel-Iran thing, was pizza orders in and around the Pentagon. Here's the summary:
Three readers independently emailed me with variants on what in retrospect is sort of an obvious question, which is: “Is it market manipulation to order like 200 pizzas to an office near the Pentagon, and then buy calls on oil?”
YEEEESS, my DUUUDEs that's how we do it, ah.
...too bad, though, that nobody is trading on the Pizza data itself, even though it's a leading indicator of geopolitical events going down (and thus oil prices going up).
"obviously if nobody trades on that data then you’ve just wasted money on pizza."
Hashtag PhD proposal
Trading one security with inside information about another security seems bad in some fuzzy but obvious way; ordering too many pizzas to trick people into buying oil is murkier. “Park 100 cars in the parking lot of some retailer announcing earnings next week, and buy calls on the company,” that sort of thing:
"You were misleading someone, probably (the hedge funds examining satellite images of that parking lot), but why did they think they were entitled to rely on that parking lot for their trading?"
Man, these are excellent trolling attempts.
...almost as funny as this.
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