Hi, Strange thread title I know, bear with me. I’ve had a few rough ideas in my head for a while, and I would like to just see what people think - they may be utterly stupid… Let me set the scene; you are an analyst, covering supermarket stocks (for example). Periodically results are released concerning their performance, and adjustments are made to the stock price as required. To get ahead of the game, and give yourself a clearer picture of what is going on in the supermarket industry, you combine CCTV footage from numerous supermarket entrances with special “footfall” software. The software can take the CCTV feed and tell you the number of cars/people/trucks/whatever passing through the field of vision. Gather this data over a significantly long period. Perhaps over the next couple of months you observe that the average number of customers visiting “Supermarketchain A” is down 10% relative to history & competition. You can’t say for sure whether the people are spending more/less, but the curious fall in customers may go unnoticed by the other market participants until the next set of official results are released. You bet on the rise/fall of the stock prices accordingly. Hmmm, so is this a rediculous line of thought? Surely there is nothing naughty about simply counting the number of customers walking into a chain of shops and drawing your own conclusions, right? Likewise, perhaps you could employ this tactic on a handful of key highways, and given a sufficiently large accumulation of data, you might be able to use the decrease/increase in trucks passing by as a subtle indicator of impending boom/doom in the wider economy. To explain that a little better, I simply mean, if there is a noticeable surge in the volume of highway trucks (relative to previous years of course) the economic winds are favourable. The reason these thoughts occured to me were because I came across a couple of interesting articles a while ago: 1) The release of the incredibly expensive Bugatti Veyron was a subtle indicator that the western economy had “gone too far” and trouble was ahead. 2) Increasing length of women’s skirts on fashion walks historically signals impending economic doom. Regardless of whether the above 2 articles are accurate/spurious, they got me to thinking is all… What are your general thoughts on what you’ve just read? Garbage 
? Thanks, cya
Story goes that once Sam Walton was flying over some walmart store in the midwest. He noticed the parking lot was nearly empty so he told the pilot to set the plane down. It turns out the whole town was watching a local football game. but what you’re talking about is really just a detailed channel check it seems to me.