What if the most powerful opportunities for wealth weren't hidden in Wall Street algorithms or billion-dollar databases, but in the ordinary details of your own life? Every coffee receipt, every neighborhood shift, every subtle change in how people shop is a form of small data-tiny signals that, when recognized, can unlock surprising paths to growth, better decisions, and lasting prosperity.
This book is a guide to seeing what most people overlook. It challenges the myth that only corporations with vast troves of information can profit from patterns, showing instead how anyone can use everyday analytics to make smarter choices about money, career, and investments. Drawing on insights from psychology, economics, sociology, and cultural history, it reveals why we're wired to ignore the obvious, how consumer behavior signals predict future demand, and why local trend investing often beats global forecasts.
Through eye-opening stories and practical exercises, you'll discover:
- How personal spending analysis can uncover hidden habits that shape your financial future
- The surprising ways micro-signals-like shifting traffic flows, empty storefronts, or changing routines-hint at larger market movements
- How to distinguish true pattern recognition from noise and avoid costly overreactions
- Why cultivating attention as a scarce resource is the foundation of building data-driven money habits
Whether you're an entrepreneur, an investor, or simply someone who wants to make sharper choices with your resources, this book will show you how to profit from the overlooked signals all around you. By the final chapter, you'll not only understand the value of everyday analytics-you'll know how to harness them as a practical advantage in both your financial and personal life.
Autorentext
Evelyn Hawthorne writes about the overlooked numbers that quietly steer our choices-receipts, routines, local price shifts, and small consumer quirks. Her work blends behavioral insight with street-level observation, helping readers spot practical edges in everyday life. She has spent years studying how households, independent retailers, and neighborhoods signal larger shifts long before they hit headlines. Hawthorne's earlier book, The Price of Forgetting: How Subscriptions Steal Our Money and Minds, examined the hidden costs of automatic spending and the discipline required to reclaim financial clarity. In Everyday Signals, she continues that mission with a sharper lens: showing how subtle, credible evidence-gathered from one's own life and surroundings-can improve money decisions, career timing, and investment judgment. She writes with calm rigor and a bias for the useful over the flashy.