Howard Linzdon, the master-mind of Wall Strip, has an amazing blog post I ran across a few days back. In the post Howard freely shares some brilliant concepts that I believe are still ahead of their time. In my post Brand Reputation Optimization (BRO) I suggested that brands could be monitored on various online websites in order to ascertain trends, customer feedback, etc’ An example would be the CIA’s use of Facebook, or Google’s Zeitgeist.

In his post, Howard explains how he used several applications and strategies to keep tabs on Crocs (CROX) and in so doing was able to reap some hefty rewards.

Monitoring websites for consumer trends and patterns is the wave of the future’ to be able to apply this concept to picking stocks is a very powerful application and I would be interested to know if any other hedge fund managers are taking a similar approach in their “black box” strategies.