Cosaic Debuts Options Analytics Charting, Sentiment Study

​Cosaic, the charting graphics and data integration provider formerly known as ChartIQ, unveiled a new display tool last month as part of version 8.1 of its ChartIQ visualization platform, ChartIQ Options Analytics, which officials say expands the vendor’s existing capabilities to meet a broader range of financial firms’ business needs.

Eugene Sorenson, chief product officer at Cosaic, says Options Analytics addresses challenges facing large financial firms around distribution and consistency of charting applications. The vendor’s charting tool has been modified to support options analytics, such as implied volatility, volume, and open interest, in addition to the other listed and highly-liquid markets already supported by its software, such as equities, futures, currencies, and cryptocurrencies. The aim with this rollout is to integrate those analytics with a firm’s existing applications and datasets.

Sorenson says that while most firms rely on a vendor solution to provide options analytics in the derivatives space, large trading firms struggle to provide those analytics to all the internal users and clients who need them. Cosaic’s visualization platform allows users to distribute these analytics both to internal and external customers, providing all those potential users with a consistent view of the same analysis, regardless of any existing analytics platforms they already use.

“Then there’s the integration challenge across applications,” he adds. “When you buy a vendor solution, it usually remains in its own ‘box’… whereas one of our strengths is pulling in proprietary content into our existing analytics. So if you want to look at a volatility smile over time, you just link to the time-series dataset.”

By building Cosaic’s ChartIQ charting library directly into existing client applications, such as the user’s order management system, Options Analytics enables firms to “enrich their application environment” without diluting their core competency around trading strategies to focus on building graphics tools. Sorenson says that this also allows them to reduce or eliminate their reliance on third-party charting and analytics applications that have strict conditions—and associated fees—governing how and where they can be used.

That said, Cosaic will also work with other vendors—for example, whose core competency may be risk analytics, but not charts that display those analytics graphically—that want to offer a charting component “with minimal effort and cost,” he adds.

Options Analytics is a Javascript library that runs on a user’s desktop. “You pump data in, and embed our graphics library within your application,” Sorenson says, adding that, although it requires a developer to integrate the Javascript code into users’ applications, the process moves quickly. “Our experience is that you can get it running in a few days, depending on your business requirements and standards.”

The tool also features a new Options Sentiment Study, which overlays options put and call activity onto a price chart, so traders and analysts can validate their price analysis, by seeing where other market participants are positioned—and hence, at what prices levels of support and resistance exist—and to predict how the market will move.

Sorenson says the idea for the sentiment study originated from some work Cosaic was doing with CME Group around how to better educate traders on options markets. He ran the idea past CME’s chief economist Blu Putnam, an expert in portfolio risk and Bayesian models, who gave it a thumbs-up, so the vendor incorporated it into the Options Analytics tool.