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CEO CHAT: WSH’s Star Says Corporate Event Data Boosts Trading Opportunities
Traders Magazine Online News, May 11, 2017
Corporate event plus data equals trading opportunity.
That’s how Wall Street Horizon’s CEO Barry Star sees his firm’s position in the current market structure. Traders need more and more data in order to trade the market and find alpha. In this exclusive interview with Traders Magazine, he talked about how his firm operates, how options traders can use corporate event data and what’s the rest of the year going to look like.
Barry Star
Traders Magazine: Wall Street Horizon bills itself as providing the industry’s “the most accurate and comprehensive set of corporate event dates.” What events do you track, and who are your clients?
Barry Star: “We track over 40 different event types and provide both forward-looking and historical datasets for events such as earnings dates, dividend dates, options expiration dates, splits, spinoffs and investor-related conferences. On the trading side, our clients run the gamut from quants whose models leverage our datasets to market makers who operate at microsecond speeds to fundamental investors who want to determine optimal position timing. At the end of the day, event dates are all volatility events, so the common denominator among our client base is that they are all investors who want visibility into approaching volatility so they can capitalize on it or avoid it. Option traders in particular find value in our data for that reason.”
TM: What are some examples of how option traders use the data?
Star: “In general, even known event date changes are volatility events, which makes accurate and timely knowledge of them very important for traders. For example, not too long ago, a number of option traders were burned when Apple changed its earnings date. These traders researched what they thought was Apple's next earnings date based on a “best guess” date published by one of our competitors. So when Apple announced that the actual release date was a week later than many expected, which put it on the other size of an options expiration date, a large number of investors who bought weekly contracts in hopes of capturing the Earnings Premium were caught short when the value of their positions dropped to zero. Our clients were fine. That's why we sweat the details - such as marking and constantly updating various dates as unconfirmed or confirmed – so our clients don’t have to.”
TM: It almost sounds like this could be classified as “alternative data.” Would you agree?
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