I have no evidence that RELX has done anything wrong. But as a hypothetical exercise, suppose a company LIKE that was conspiring with OC and, say, a corrupt hedge fund? cc @ninaandtito /1
RELX does a lot of scientific publishing. It also preovides a lot of big data, business analytics, anti-money laundering services to financial institutions. If you want to, let's say, evade AML, it would be great to know all the best AML methods /2
Scientific papers get submitted to the many Elsevier and ScienceDirect journals for peer review in advance of publication. Suppose there were criminals who wanted to "monetize" this early access to some of this information? How would you do it. /3
You would not have to compromise an army of the world's top scientists. The papers that get submitted, I am sure, are carefully stored, under digital lock and key, inside the company's information systems. /4
If there were criminals in the company's management, a fox among the chickens, they might hire "Information Technology Security Consultants" to lock down their internal systems. A corrupt IT firm could carefully install back doors. /5
Now using your advanced business analytics, big data, artificial intelligence scanning tools, routine automated searches could be conducted on everything submitted for anything interesting. Like adverse event data in clinical trials. /6
If this information was provided in a timely manner to a corrupt secretive hedge fund, they would know what to do with it. But how do they pay the publisher back? The publisher offers all kinds of data services at astronomical prices. /7
The hedge fund buys all kinds of data and business analytics services because ... of course. That's their business. Everyone makes all sorts of clean legal profits. It's amazing that RELX and the Renaissance Medallion Fund routinely achieve 30% + returns. /8
It's almost like they can print money. There must be some very wise guys and gals working there. Who knows? But they do have a financial history with interesting partners: Shamrock, Murdoch, Maxwell /9
Now if you add in an organized crime slash state actor conducting routine corporate espionage, they may turn up interesting dirt than can feed back into the "business analytics" sold by the publisher. A firm's key exec will resign soon because we found dirt. Sell short. /10 //
