The Fairway Signal

Wall Street spent the early 2000s building models. Quantitative systems processing millions of data points. Risk algorithms monitoring every basis point. Bloomberg terminals glowing on every trading floor on earth.

Nobody monitored the golf courses.

Between 1986 and 2005, America built over 4,000 new golf courses. Not because demand required them. Because developers built courses to sell homes, and homes were selling. Course construction tracked something no quant model measured: how rich people felt.

The terminals tracked price. The permits tracked behavior.

By 2006, closures outnumbered openings for the first time. By 2008, the pattern completed. Over the next decade, 1,645 courses disappeared from the American landscape. Eleven percent of peak supply, gone.

The quant models missed it. The golf course permits had it years early.

This isn't a golf story. It's a measurement story.

The most sophisticated financial instruments in history were calibrated to track what was available: prices, volumes, spreads. Not what was meaningful: the behavioral excess that precedes every bust.

The best leading indicator wasn't behind a terminal. It was behind a bulldozer.

Go deeper: Dashboard Blindness