A lot of publicly-traded companies are web-based entities and do business over one or more web sites. So if a company is due to announce earnings in a few weeks, one can speculate that the earnings have some correlation with the activity (expressed as number of visits) of the web site. Only if we could spy on that company's web site - or can we? Yes, we can. Companies, like Alexa.com, a company now owned by Amazon.com, have distributed millions of toolbar programs that run on the user's PC, and among, other things, report back to Alexa.com who visits which sites. Those traffic values are available for free at Alexa.com.

So, for example, Points.com (Points International Ltd.) a Canadian company, trading under the symbol PTSEF on OTCBB, is scheduled to announce earnings for their third quarter, ending on September 30th,  on  November 8th 2007. One can go to Alexa.com, and look up the page views of Points.com. This should give some indication of the business activity of the company (picking up or slowing down) during the third quarter. How is this for "inside information"?