Web Data Mining for Stock Analysis

Here is a story form Reuters about an interesting trend in stock analysis. According to this article:

With e-commerce now comprising a larger share of consumer spending than ever before, Web-based data mining has become a rich source to track products sales and generate sales leads.

But instead of sales leads, Majestic uses Web data to track sales and forecast financial results for target companies - ahead of quarterly earnings releases.

According to this article, hedge funds are the early adopters for this service from Majestic Research. Here is a link to their methodology.