How Traders Use Google Searches to See the Economic Recovery in Real Time

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Every week, hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway take you on a not-so-random walk through hot topics in markets, finance, and economics.

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 werent timely enough to get a read on what was going on. On this 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.