BUILDING PROFIT FROM DATA published , usually from governments and public bodies , but what ’ s interesting there is that that the data tends to be very stale , usually coming out two or three months after the fact .
“ So , if you can start knowing information about construction activity much closer to real-time , it empowers you to get ahead of the market .
“ The rest of the market will learn what happens three months from now , so if you can know what ’ s happening now or with a two or three-week lag , it empowers you to know things that others won ’ t be aware of for a month or two and take investment decisions in advance .
“ The other way that construction data is leveraged on Wall Street is in a company-specific way .
“ There are all kinds of companies whose profits and revenue are a function of construction activity – maybe it ’ s a lumber or an iron ore company , or a business that builds houses . All of these companies are going to be sensitive to construction activity .
“ You can learn all kinds of important things about any specific company if you have good insights about what ’ s going on in construction .
“ Those are the two ways that the data gets leveraged by professional investors .”
But what kind of data is it that they ’ re interested in ?
Mining data Kamel details to Construction Global how it ’ s very much a case of quality over quantity . In fact , some datasets literally offer just one number a day , but the number is so advantageous to certain investors that they ’ ll pay a lot of money for it .
“ We have a dataset which estimates how many cars Tesla is selling on a daily basis ,” he explains .
“ Tesla is a hot stock and they are famously opaque in terms of information they release to the market , so all of the investors in Tesla are , to a large extent , flying blind . But with this dataset we are able to report to them : ‘ Hey , Tesla sold this many cars today ,’ which is gold for them because otherwise they wouldn ’ t know . There ’ s no other way of knowing .
“ So that ’ s an example of just one number and it ’ s worth a lot of money to these investors .”
And Kamel reckons that same rule of thumb is applicable to the
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