How Traders Used Google Searches To See The Economic Recovery In Real Time
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 17 September 2020
⏱️ 40 minutes
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Summary
The use of so-called "alternative data" has been gathering attention for some time. Investors have been looking at things like credit cards or satellite photos of Walmart parking lots for insights into businesses before earnings or official government numbers come out. But during this crisis, alternative data has really come into its own. The speed of the crash and recovery happened so fast, it was clear that traditional numbers weren’t timely enough to get a read on what was going on. On this week's episode, we speak with Ben Breitholtz of Arbor Data Science, who explains how he's been able to monitor thousands of different categories of Google Search queries to know instantly when the recovery started to happen and what sectors of the economy were leading the way.
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| 0:00.0 | Together we have the opportunity to build a more sustainable and inclusive future. |
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| 0:11.0 | by cultivating new connections among global leaders that transcend geographies, industries |
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| 0:18.4 | Because when global leaders work together, the outcomes benefit all of us. |
| 0:23.0 | Learn more at Bloomberg New Economy.com. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast I'm |
| 0:45.0 | I'm Tracy Allowatt's podcast. |
| 0:48.0 | So I don't know what day people are going to be listening to this episode but you know the stock market hit a record high |
| 0:56.5 | yesterday. Yeah it's true so all the losses that we saw during the COVID crisis have basically been raised and markets are back where they were before all of this happened. |
| 1:08.9 | Yeah, it's essentially six months from the pre-crisis peak to this one so I think the S&P peaked at |
| 1:17.7 | February 15th and then we saw the the new peak yesterday August 18th and in a sense it really feels like we've |
| 1:26.9 | compressed this sort of gigantic cycle into an extremely short period of time. |
| 1:31.8 | Yeah that's true. |
| 1:33.0 | And I was looking at the latest fund manager survey from Bank of America, |
| 1:37.5 | and it showed that I think fund managers have completely flipped from thinking that we're in a recession to thinking that we're in the early stages |
| 1:46.3 | of a fresh economic cycle. And if they're right, to your point, it does suggest that we've just seen |
| 1:51.8 | one of the shortest |
| 1:53.1 | recessions of all time. Yeah I mean you could make the argument that the |
| 1:57.5 | recession recession in terms of the shrinking of growth was done by the end of |
| 2:01.1 | March when most data points started turning up and while the overall level of |
| 2:07.1 | economic activity is still very depressed and of course unemployment rate is still above 10 percent so hardly time to be declaring victory. |
| 2:15.0 | We have seen steady improvement on a host of economic data points |
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