
Tailspotting: Identifying and profiting from CEO vacation trips - mathattack
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X14000920
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phil21
This was what came to immediate mind after reading about ADS-B becoming
mandatory in the US a few years back. This started a small few-month long
obsession to understand it all, and became one of my more fun hobbies in the
past few years. It already is mandatory in Europe. I didn't think of the
vacationing correlation to stock prices, but simply tracking corporate
movements and inferring future stock price movement from those movements.
"Wall Street" of course coming to immediate mind here.

For those not aware, ADS-B is essentially a transmitter in aircraft that
periodically report registration number, altitude, GPS coordinates, and
airspeed. This is to supplement the current air traffic control system, and
eventually take it over. This data is in real time, and not delayed or
censored like the FAA supplied data feeds are.

It is not encrypted, so anyone with an antenna and the proper equipment can
get the location information of every equipped aircraft within usually a
50-250mi radius, depending on antenna height, receiver quality, topology, etc.
While many US domestic aircraft are not so equipped, this is rapidly changing
as I believe all must be by 2022. Any aircraft that ever enters European
airspace must be equipped, so that means for practical purposes any
International flight can be tracked. This includes most corporate jets which
are used to fly anywhere but within the United States.

It's trivial to decode in software, and I run a couple installations with
hacked up USB DBS TV dongles. They are not the highest quality (a few
enterprising folks sell custom ASIC/boards for doing this better), but are
cheap and easy to make work.

It's a fun project to hack on for a weekend, I learned a bit about software
defined radio among other things. Even fixed a bug in some code that
accidentally calculated the aircraft's location to the wrong hemisphere :)
Turns out GPS math is somewhat interesting, in the way they encode the data
for the little bandwidth available.

This is also the data that powers flightradar24, and probably some other sites
out there. Basically a network of enthusiasts that run antenna installations
reporting their data to a central server for visualization.

I brought a small antenna and box on vacation with me to Jamaica a couple
years back, and was able to track aircraft a good 300nm+ off the coast from
the beach. It was fun watching the tracks route around storms and such.

~~~
gadders
I always thought a fun phone app would be a Google Sky clone for aeroplanes.
i.e. instead of pointing your phone at a planet, point it at a plane and get
the ADS-B details on it appear.

~~~
IgorPartola
Ask Siri "What planes are above me?".

~~~
gshubert17
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=flights+overhead](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=flights+overhead)

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pjc50
You can use a similar technique for identifying international arms dealers,
sanction busters, CIA rendition flights, etc. Alex Harrowell occasionally
blogs about this:

[http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2011/01/09/a-quick-
howto/](http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2011/01/09/a-quick-howto/) \-
aircraft investigation resources

[http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/07/23/o-rly/](http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/07/23/o-rly/)
\- Suspicious Iran-to-Syria flights

[http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2009/12/23/mystery-jet-
upda...](http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2009/12/23/mystery-jet-update-
malian-727/) \- mystery 727 in a desert

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pserwylo
One of the best pieces of advice I heard from our resident stats/machine
learning researcher at Uni was this: If a paper is published which claims to
show a technique for profiting on the share market, then it doesn't work. If
it did, they wouldn't have published it.

Having said that, there is plenty of interesting papers in this area, and from
the abstract, this paper seems to take an interesting approach too.

~~~
ganeumann
Interesting academic work on this recently. It shows that, as expected, the
publication of a working investment strategy decreases its efficacy.

[http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=64857...](http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=648576)

Of course, contra your ML researcher, this presupposes that there are
effective strategies that are published.

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paulgb
A similar technique was used to "predict" Sarah Palin's choice as running mate
in 2008.

> In 2008, as John McCain prepared to announce his running mate, Fitzpatrick
> and his fellow trader Joe Schilling were monitoring the movements of all the
> contenders, calling their press secretaries and checking a flight-tracking
> website. They noticed a Gulfstream jet from Anchorage, Alaska, bound for the
> site of a McCain rally, and bought Sarah Palin, a longshot. When the
> surprise pick was unveiled, Fitzpatrick took home $25,000.

Source: [http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewrice/the-fall-of-intrade-
and-t...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewrice/the-fall-of-intrade-and-the-
business-of-betting-on-real-life) (despite being from buzzfeed, the article is
well worth reading)

~~~
rbanffy
In mid 2012 the company I was working for went through a lengthy acquisition
process. I started monitoring our corporate calendar and meeting rooms in
Exchange. One day I figured out our CTO was leaving the company: our head of
HR, the CTO and all his managers were to be unavailable in a couple hours, for
the same 30 minutes and, at the same time, one of the meeting rooms was
booked.

It was announced the next day. Right after the meeting, one of his managers
had several new bookings extending through most of his day. We accurately
predicted (with some surprise) the successor.

~~~
joezydeco
Meta-use of a shared company calendar is worthy of a whole separate article,
IMO.

From personal experience - even if you can't see where your management is
meeting or who they are meeting with, just knowing they will be out of the
office can be valuable. Especially when you are job-hunting.

~~~
rev_bird
The only thing I've managed to use shared calendars for up to this point is
figuring out when the meetings with leftover food were ending.

~~~
rbanffy
You really should put that code on Github. ;-)

It would be exceedingly popular.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'll be happy to provide it as a service. You just share your calendar with my
system, and it will automatically tell you when your boss is away and where
you can get free food.

I will totally not use this data to trade stocks ;).

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SuperKlaus
pdf for download here:
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2022822](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2022822)

~~~
Flenser
viewable in browser (chrome at least) here:
[http://lsr.nellco.org/nyu_lewp/293/](http://lsr.nellco.org/nyu_lewp/293/)

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mlamat
My first thought was: there obviously needs to be a reference to the 1987
movie "Wall Street" in there somewhere.

"Due to their large size, aircraft can also be observed physically taking off
and landing at airports by scouts stationed as “tailspotters,” a role played
memorably by actor Charlie Sheen in the 1987 feature film Wall Street."

Yep, I'm right.

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bagosm
So a CEO that wants to see interest in their stock rise, should just take
vacation more often. Win for everyone!

~~~
logfromblammo
Or schedule flights to their vacation homes using easily identified planes.
They don't actually have to go with the plane.

I imagine that a Stingray-like IMSI/IMEI/MEID interceptor that looked for
executive mobile phones could be even more profitable.

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andrewtbham
Here is a video explaining the idea.

[http://vimeo.com/44382964](http://vimeo.com/44382964)

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nodetrend
This is cool, although companies have probably become aware of this.

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Aqwis
What can they do? Send their executives on random vacations and plane trips?

~~~
bengali3
you're close :) Use a charter aircraft that flys many different clients is one
way to limit this, or offer their own aircraft available for charter when its
not in use by the company. All corporate flight departments already do charter
other aircraft for supplemental lift or when an aircraft is down for
maintenance.

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zhte415
Paywalled. $39.95.

~~~
drcoopster
scroll up for link to PDF

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yellowapple
I'll take this to mean that we should just fire our CEO and not have to worry
about problems ever again. ;)

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deathf
Testing attention please.

