About Sarateal
Sarateal
Spatiotemporal Market Opportunity Index
“Where, for which product, and at what time is there a real opportunity to enter an agricultural market?”
Supply, demand, prices, weather, location, and competition usually live as separate pieces of information. Looked at in isolation, none of them tells a farmer, trader, buyer, or business whether entering a particular market is attractive.
Sarateal brings those signals together into a single market-opportunity assessment that changes with place and time. Its output is deliberately not one number: it separates how attractive a market appears from how much evidence supports that assessment.
What Sarateal produces
For every market, product, and time period, three related outputs.
Opportunity score
How attractive does the available evidence suggest the market is?
Confidence score
How strong and reliable is the evidence behind that assessment?
Entry signal
A plain interpretation of O and C that separates a well-supported opportunity from an interesting but poorly observed one.
The five signals behind opportunity
Sarateal combines five dimensions. Each captures a different reason why a market may or may not be attractive.
- 01Supply–demand imbalanceDoes observed demand exceed observed supply? A market with unmet demand can be an opportunity for a new supplier or entrant. Missing records are never read as zero — they lower confidence instead.
- 02Price opportunityIs the price environment attractive? Price is read in relation to its trend, to economically connected markets, and to volatility.
- 03Spatial accessibilityHow reachable is the market? A gravity-style model weighs market attractiveness against travel time, so strong demand behind an expensive journey scores differently.
- 04Seasonal timingThe same market can be attractive in one month and not the next. Supply, demand, price, and weather seasonality are combined over place, product, and time.
- 05CompetitionA busy market may already be well served. Nearby competitors count far more than distant ones, weighted by accessibility rather than merely counted.
Combining the signals
O = Σ wₖSₖ ÷ Σ wₖ
Only components with real evidence participate. Their weights are renormalized over what is actually available, so missing data is never silently converted into a zero score.
Confidence is a separate calculation
C = Σ wₖCₖ ÷ Σ wₖ
The question isn't only “how attractive is the market?” but “how much evidence supports that conclusion?” Each component carries its own evidence score from the number of observations, their recency, data quality, spatial coverage, and diversity of contributors.
The entry signal
O and C are deliberately kept apart, then read together.
The data principle
Sarateal is built on real observations rather than fabricated completeness. Supply, demand, prices, and market outcomes come from real records; location and weather may come from live public sources. Missing information is left missing — it is never replaced with invented values, and sparse data simply flows into the confidence assessment.
What is distinctive
- Opportunity and confidence stay separate instead of being multiplied into one score.
- Missing observations reduce confidence rather than automatically reducing opportunity.
- The index is explicitly spatiotemporal: market × product × time.
- The system gets more empirically informed as genuine market outcomes accumulate — it never fabricates data to compensate for gaps.
See the index in action
Open the workspace and score a market-product cell from real records.
Open the workspace