3 Companies Revolutionizing The Way Traders Get Information

Trading and investing is no longer just for the elite.

New companies with new technology want to help new and old market participants improve the way they get information

Benzinga likes to keep an eye on notable companies in the emerging financial technology sector, that’s why the BZ Fintech Awards have brought them together. (Don’t forget to vote for your favorite here!)

Here’s a few companies from the competition that are using technology to change the way information is accessed and viewed in the wild world of finance:

Capital Market Laboratories

Capital Market Laboratories wants people to look at financial data a little differently.

The company was founded with the idea of bringing the power of visual and living data to the world of finance, according to founder Ophir Gottlieb.

“As opposed to having data, let’s say, that exists on a screen as it is, we want you to have data that you can move around yourself,” he told Benzinga.

Related Link: How Crowdsourcing Is Democratizing The World Of Finance

CML brings the power of visualization to traders and investors by taking large amounts of data and presenting it in a graphic form.

The work that Capital Market Labs does is based on research that says the human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text, Gottlieb explained, and that 50 percent of all nerve fibers in the brain are connected to the retina.

Gottlieb says the goal is to change the world, but he knows Capital Market Labs can’t do it alone.

“We believe we can help other people change the world simply by doubling or tripling the capacity of their brains to understand things,” he said.

While gathering a large amount of data might take an investment banker an entire day, Gottlieb thinks Capital Market Labs can do that in as little as four seconds.

NewsHedge

NewsHedge Founder Kevin Evenhouse was a trader, himself, on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He’d been trading roughly for a little more than a decade, and he told Benzinga that one issue he always had was trying to figure out immediately what was impacting markets.

“We were having a hard time finding out immediately what it was that was affecting the SPUS, for example. It could be oil breaking. It could be the dollar. It could be a number of things,” he said.

That’s why the idea was born to track markets on a “granular level” and then broadcast the information, Evenhouse explained. NewsHedge uses event-detection algorithms with a text-to-speech engine, so breaking news events are audibly communicated to traders right at their desks.

A recent example of what NewsHedge can do was last month when Apple dropped rapidly from $117 to the $111 level in just two minutes. The event was both disrupting and confusing, but the NewsHedge Squawk alerted its users well before the two-minute mark was up and much faster than any other media source, Evenhouse said.

ChartIQ

Finance wouldn’t be the same without technical analysis, and ChartIQ rounds out this list by democratizing those tools for traders.

Co-Founder Dan Schleifer told Benzinga that ChartIQ is meant to change a dynamic in the marketplace for individual investors and traders by giving them “access to professional-grade charting and technical analysis tools regardless of who they were, what budget they had and what device they were on.”

A look at the marketplace for such tools only a few years ago yielded Bloomberg and some of its counterparts, Schleifer explained, which the average investors (like Schleifer, himself) couldn’t afford.

That’s why the ChartIQ founders wanted to take high-level technology to every single trader and investor, as well as making it available on every platform.

“We really were then and are still today the only professional-grade charting and technical analysis tools that work on every device,” he said.

Don’t forget to check out all of the amazing companies in the Fintech Awards competition and vote for the most innovative ones!