London Cabs as early economic indicators.....

This is fascinating*...Bloomberg reports that:

In a quarterly poll of 500 cabbies by U.K.-based corporate- recovery specialist Begbies Traynor, the drivers said traffic between the City, London's financial district, and London's airports has declined and the number of calls to take bankers home from the office at night is on the wane.

I wonder what 'Net based datastreams would give these same sort of early indications.....one assumes Google or Yahoo can analyse their searchstreams to get a view of early indicators, but what publicly available data might be available

This sort of early trending would be worth a lot.....retail financial investors for example, who are typically left out the loop and get sold the financial products long after the trend is underway - in fact so late that its apparently better to be contrarian, as a recent article in The Financial Analysts Journal by Thomas Arnold, John Earl and David North showed:

They essentially looked at how a company’s stock price responds to a cover story in BusinessWeek, Fortune and Forbes. In general, positive stories come at the end of periods of positive performance and negative stories after periods of negative performance. When a cover story appears it tends to signal the end of the performance trend - ie it is no longer “news” - and typically marks the turning point.


And of course this does not take into account the...ummm...."exclusive social networks of financial professionals" that the retail investor is left out of (the poor old retail investor usually being the bigger fool at the end of the bubble).

Making the chinese whispers echoing around the walls open to all would be truly disruptive.....

(* Saw it originally on Samizdata)