Yep that's exactly it. That's the purpose of the kind of market research I'm talking about.

It attempts to say something about what burning needs people have that are going unmet.

You are doing  this in a way when designing SN algorithms and even features, I guess. I remember when you gave Car a little jab: "See, you wanted bookmarks, but you dont use them." Predicting what people want and how they will react.

siggy47

TA is another beast all together I think. The kind of quantification I'm talking about doesn't make price predictions as much as it tries to say "who/why/how/etc are people most unhappy when using products in this market category."

It's related to TA in that it's trying to help you draw conclusions that are otherwise hard to draw though.

k00b

bitcoin

_Broken Money_ book club, part 4

elvismercury

Your response reminds me of the whole theory of technical analysis. I was interested in stock trading in a former life. I never trusted TA, but it is intriguing that human herd emotion can be charted and used as a predictive tool. Of course, "models" fail all the time, so these strategies never approach the level of science.