Do You Trade Options? Here's A Tool You Might Like

The 2016 Benzinga Fintech Awards is the only event in fintech dedicated to recognizing innovation in financial services and capital markets. Ahead of Tuesday's awards show and gala, meet the industry leaders who will be in attendance.

Who they are: Recognia, a research firm that develops resources for quantitative and technical analysis. Their Options Ideas tool makes options trading easier for retail traders and investors.

What was the impetus for developing a product like Options Ideas? Peter Ashton, Recognia vice president of client services: For over 15 years, Recognia has helped retail investors find and validate investing opportunities for stocks and ETFs. With the emergence of options as a popular asset class, we set out to create a product that would enable typical retail investors to easily find options trading ideas based on the principles of technical analysis.

What differentiates your product from products at other companies?
Ashton: Options Ideas is built upon Recognia’s unique analytics for automated technical analysis and chart pattern recognition. No other technical analysis company has the breadth or depth of analysis we provide. Using this underpinning, we created a product which generates daily options trading ideas based on underlying technical events.

We analyze over 800,000 options contracts every day and use our scoring system to surface the most actionable ideas for traders based on analysis of thousands of possible options strategies. We do all the heavy lifting so traders don’t have to.
How has Options Ideas leveraged some of the principles of fintech?
Ashton: Recognia has always been about bringing the benefits of computer automation to investors and traders. Years ago our founder realized that the computer revolution had changed our lives in almost every way. Unfortunately investing hadn’t benefited to the same degree.

We set out to create investment research products which leveraged the power of mass computing to analyze financial data in ways that had never before been possible. We also leverage the web to deliver our research to end-users in graphical and intuitive ways that scale across many device types.
Why are you looking forward to the Benzinga Fintech Awards?
Ashton: Obviously, we are looking forward to showing off our Options Ideas product. But we are always looking to learn and hear about some of the new trends and technologies being exploited by other companies. As a fintech community we are always learning from each other to push the yardsticks forward every year.

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