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.
When Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, the execs would both meet in a third, neutral city but would fly into other airports within a few hours' drive of the meeting location specifically so that anyone tracking their planes wouldn't know they were flying to the same location.
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.
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.
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 ;).
Depending on how the calendering system reports busy-ness, there's a nice timing attack on figuring out who people are meeting with. If the calendar shows busy when an invitation has been sent, instead of when someone accepts the invitation, and you take snapshots frequently enough, you can probably group people into meetings based on when the meeting showed up on peers' calendars.
> 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... (despite being from buzzfeed, the article is well worth reading)