Bloomberg Adds Orbital Insight Parking Lot Data to Terminal

Data giant Bloomberg has begun carrying the US Consumer Retail dataset from Palo Alto, Calif.-based aerial imagery analysis provider Orbital Insight on its Bloomberg Professional terminal, to integrate the vendor’s analysis with traditional fundamental and financial data delivered via Bloomberg.

The data includes daily car counts for parked cars at 80 US retailers—including department stores, home improvement stores, discount retailers, consumer staples, grocery stores at the store-level and chain-level, and wholesalers—with five years of historical year-on-year comparisons.

The vendors have “tickerized” Orbital Insight’s coverage universe to seamlessly overlay Bloomberg’s data and displays, and to enable users to compare this to other investment metrics, such as revenue and consensus same-store sales percentage revision.

Orbital Insight officials say the integration will help the vendor better meet the needs of buy-side traders, analysts, risk professionals and others who rely on Bloomberg terminals, and for whom geospatial analytics provide “a timely and accurate source” of additional value, by being delivered directly within their existing Bloomberg-based workflow.

Chicago-based alternative asset manager Balyasny Asset Management, which is a client of Orbital Insight, says the move reaffirms the importance of using best-in-class technologies to power more timely and objective intelligence through Bloomberg’s terminal.

“Legacy sources of financial data are often prone to reporting bias and informational latency. In response, Orbital Insight has developed a suite of software products designed to measure the underlying drivers of equity and commodity asset classes through timely and objective intelligence,” says Marco DeMeireles, head of private investments at Balyasny, noting how Orbital Insight has “pioneered new techniques for ingesting, cleansing and interpreting disparate sources of data,” such as satellite and geolocation information.

Bloomberg subscribers can view visualizations of the Orbital Insight data in their terminal, or can download the underlying data by accessing ORBT <GO> on their Bloomberg terminal.

Bloomberg is also an investor in Orbital Insight via its Bloomberg Beta early-stage private equity fund.