Cboe Integrates Trade Alert Into Information Solutions Business

Cboe Global Markets has acquired Trade Alert, a real-time alerts and order flow analysis service provider based in New York. Trade Alert will be incorporated into the Cboe Information Solutions business alongside this year’s earlier purchases, Hanweck and FT Options. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

Trade Alert adds to the suite—which offers services covering global indexes, execution services, market data and risk analytics—real-time trade data, market activity and proprietary Cboe content, which can be delivered via the exchange’s communications pipeline or other common chat platforms such as Symphony Communications and Ice Chat, so that clients will not have to subscribe to a new application, says Catherine Clay, SVP and head of Information Solutions at Cboe.

Last summer, after several consultations with clients, Cboe set out to meet their demand for a seamless workflow and better tools for calculating and hedging risk.

“Our clients were really focused on risk [at that time]. Here we are in 2020, and that was spot on when our clients were telling us they needed better ways to navigate the market,” Clay says, with a nod to the service gaps Cboe has sought to fill with Hanweck, a real-time risk analytics provider, and FT Options, a portfolio management platform combining research with risk and volatility analytics.

“But the one thing we didn’t have solved was real-time messaging around market content and color. And so when folks were really trying to understand what order flow was telling them in the market—what is the sentiment, what is the meaning behind what we’re seeing in the derivatives marketplace—we didn’t have this real-time medium for exchanging information and delivering content and curating content for the client,” Clay says.

In the future, Clay is planning to take the Information Solutions suite to more global regions and incorporate new asset classes into the offering. For now, though, she believes Cboe has the team in place to provide a product suite that covers the full trade lifecycle. To that end, Cboe Information Solutions is not seeking out more acquisitions, and is focusing instead on building solutions internally and integrating the five businesses that currently make up the business line.

Past acquisitions include LiveVol in 2015, which provides aggregated equity and derivatives market statistics, and Silexx in 2017, a front-end, multi-asset order execution management system.

Last week, Cboe released its first integrated Hanweck product onto Cboe DataShop, an e-commerce site managed by Cboe LiveVol that provides traders with market data on options, equities, indexes and exchange-traded funds. The Borrow Intensity Indicator, the last analytic to come from Hanweck prior to the acquisition, now offers, in an integrated fashion, an analytics feed that measures the intraday creditworthiness of a company based on proprietary calculations using real-time options analytics and machine learning.

“Once you have that highway of information that is touching hundreds of clients, and hundreds of clients on the top bank desks and things like that, well, that highway is open for any sort of curation of content,” Clay says. “And we definitely plan to put a lot more information, analytics, [and] curation of content from our proprietary products, for example, down that highway.”