I heard an interesting interview recently with someone who uses satellite imagery to trade stocks.
According to him there are data vendors who use such imagery to do things like (for example) look at how full the parking lots of certain retail stores are and then use that information to help them estimate how successful these businesses really are, and make stock trades based on that.
Yes, though at this point I'd say this is old news and table stakes, so I expect everyone to be using this type of data already. As an example, Orbital Insights began tracking 250k parking lots across 96 retail chains at least all the way back to 2017. Same for things like monitoring gas silo levels via satellite imagery, etc. If you read it on the blog of one of the many sat image providers I would assume there to be no more competitive advantage to be had, unless you can read additional information from that data that other traders might have missed.
According to him there are data vendors who use such imagery to do things like (for example) look at how full the parking lots of certain retail stores are and then use that information to help them estimate how successful these businesses really are, and make stock trades based on that.