investing via satellite

As part of a growing trend among hedge funds and Wall Street firms, Cold War-style satellite surveillance is being used to gather market-moving information.

The surveillance pictures are often provided by private- sector companies like DigitalGlobe in Colorado and GeoEye in Virginia, which build and launch satellites and take pictures for US government intelligence agency clients and private-sector satellite analysis firms.

That means there are two links in the chain before the satellite data gets to Wall Street—a satellite firm takes the pictures and sells them to an analysis firm, which scrutinizes the images and sells the aggregated data to hedge funds and Wall Street analysts.

As an example of how Wall Street getting in on this techhology, the UBS Investment Research issued its earnings preview for Wal-Mart's second quarter, which publicly revealed that UBS had been using used satellite services of private-sector satellite companies to gather the comings and goings of the parking lots at Wal-Mart stores. “UBS proprietary satellite parking lot fill rate analysis points to an interesting cadence intra-quarter and potential upside to our view,” the report read.

UBS analyst Neil Currie had been looking at satellite data on Wal-Mart during each month of 2010, and he’d concluded that there was enough correlation between what he was seeing in the satellite pictures of Wal-Mart’s parking lots to the big-box chain’s quarterly earnings, that he was ready to incorporate that data into UBS’ report on Wal-Mart, which releases its earnings on Tuesday.

By counting the cars in Wal-Mart’s parking lots month in and month out, Remote Sensing Metrics analysts were able to get a fix on the company’s customer flow. From there, they worked up a mathematical regression to come up with a prediction of the company’s quarterly revenue each month.

And what the satellite analysts found surprised the UBS team, which was already well versed in the ins and outs of Wal-Mart’s business.

In the second quarter, the satellite analysts had spotted a surge in traffic to Wal-Mart stores during the month of June, which was 4 percent ahead of the same month a year ago. That, they speculated, was driven by an aggressive Wal-Mart price rollback marketing campaign that brought a lot more customers into the stores that month.

Because they could see that traffic showing up in the parking lots, the satellite analysts came up with a much different projection for the company’s quarterly earnings in the second quarter than the UBS team did using traditional methods.

UBS predicts that Wal-Mart’s second quarter sales will be up from the first quarter, but down a percent against the same period a year ago. But the satellite analysts figure that the number will come in 0.7 percent higher—not lower—based on the traffic surge they saw in the parking lots.

[via Value Man @chucks@angels]