Bloomberg writers Alfred Cang and Lulu Yilun Chen reported yesterday that, “Streaming apps have taken China by storm with short videos of dancing teens, lip-syncing and all kinds of weird antics. Now traders are using them to predict the future of grain prices.
“For example, a farmer in the rural northeast is using his phone to film trucks lining up to load mounds of golden corn. Some 2,000 miles away in his Shenzhen office, Honda Wei watches attentively, scrutinizing the producer’s excited utterances and images of his fields for clues on supply and demand.
“‘It provides intuitive information about the domestic markets,’ 33-year-old Wei said of his experience on the Kuaishou app, a short-form video platform backed by tech giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. ‘Traders are seeking correlations between farmers’ sentiment and futures price fluctuation.'”
The Bloomberg article stated that, “With more than 700 million users combined, Kuaishou and Bytedance Ltd.’s Douyin offer a vast potential source of intelligence in an opaque Chinese market where government data isn’t always the most reliable or efficient. Along with social media such as Weibo, traders are gathering information on crop plantings, harvests, stockpiles and sales in real-time, instead of the hours of telephone surveys and physical travel that were once necessary.”
The Bloomberg writers explained that, “While traders internationally have used Twitter to track opportunities, acting on everything from refinery fires and ship groundings to equity market sentiment, that’s not an option in China, where the U.S.-based social network is blocked.
“In their thirst for data, many in China have turned to streaming apps as farmers started filming themselves to connect with others and help improve productivity, manage costs and maximize profits. That trend has been helped by changes in the domestic market for commodities.”
“Kuaishou, which gained a reputation for stunts performed by streamers, was one of the first to focus on growth in lower tier cities and rural areas. That helped it become the streaming app of choice for farmers, as smartphone use rises and demographics work in its favor,” the article said.
