Innovation Spotlight

Cboe provides high-quality, real-time data to some of the most innovative firms operating in financial markets today. By partnering with Cboe, these companies are able to develop unique solutions and products to better serve audiences looking to engage with markets around the world.

We put these firms in the spotlight so they can share their stories with our global network. We are proud to partner with firms operating at the forefront of global finance, and we want you to know about them too.

Opencash Website

Opencash - Making Long-Term Investing Fun

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, Andre Norman came across a Reuters article¹ that said the average holding period for U.S. shares was 5-1/2 months in June, versus 8-1/2 months at the end of 2019. Compare that to the 1950s, during which the average holding period was 8 years.²

"I was shocked at this realization," said Norman. "I already knew, based on historical data, that holding a broad-based portfolio of stocks over an extended period significantly reduces your chances of losing your principal," he said.

But, the problem is too many investors find long-term investing boring, he said. That same Reuters article said, "Warren Buffett's favorite holding period -- forever -- has few fans these days." It was then that Norman came to realization that long-term investing needed to be more fun and exciting for the new generation of investors. And, with that, the idea for Opencash was established.

Offering Incentives

Opencash developed a Scratch-Off Incentive Program to meet its mission of making long-term investing fun and exciting. The program gives customers the opportunity to win portions of a $10 million prize pool each year.

For everyone $100 worth of stocks or ETFs in a customer's account, that customer will earn 1 scratch-off ticket each week. Once the scratch-off tickets are released weekly, customers can scratch their tickets to reveal the hidden prizes.

Making it Happen

Opencash is a FINRA- and SEC-registered broker-dealer that allows customers to invest in stocks, ETFs, and options.

Opencash uses Cboe's real-time equities and options data to deliver real-time market data in its mobile app. "This is the utmost requirement because it allows our customers to get accurate and timely information about the market before making an investment decision," said Norman.

Broadening the Offering

Coming soon, Opencash plans to offer managed portfolios and a high-yield savings product as well as more ways for customers to earn tickets and win prizes. One project Opencash is currently working on is called "Investment Club," where customers will be able to pool their tickets together to improve their odds of winning a prize. Prize winnings will be split amongst members of the club.

Opencash is also planning to make a web-trading platform available to customers.

¹https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-short-termism-anal/buy-sell-repeat-no-room-for-hold-in-whipsawing-markets-idUSKBN24Z0XZ

²https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/average-stock-holding-period-121123957.html#:~:text=The%20long%2Dterm%20capital%20gains,holds%20shares%20for%205.5%20months

Fast Forward Inc. Website

Fast Forward Inc. - Investment Management for Multiple Assets

Too many assets, too few management tools

Fast Forward Inc. launched in 2020 to help retail investors manage their investments in different portfolios.

"Unlike institutional investors, retail investors have an edge in diversifying their investment portfolios resulting in a combination of various assets including equities, mutual funds, ETFs, real estate and cryptocurrencies," said Youngmin Joo, CEO/Founder.

"Demand for an all-in-one investment management tool peaked as the retail investment market exploded," said Joo. So, Fast Forward Inc. developed DOMINO an easy-to-use, intuitive app that addresses retail investors’ need to manage all their investments in different portfolios.

DOMINO

The DOMINO app provides users insight into their current, overall investment balances. Users input positions on various categories of their investment portfolios, be it equities, mutual funds, ETFs, real estate, gold or even cryptocurrencies, and then are able to track the up-to-date performance of each investment. DOMINO also provides a trending chart visualizing shifts in balances. Additionally, users can learn about the financial details of each asset including price, dividends, corporate activities, fundamentals and more.

Reliable index data

The Cboe Global Indices Feed provides real-time index data for DOMINO, including values for the Cboe Volatility Index^® (VIX^® Index) and the S&P 500^® Index.

"DOMINO prides itself on providing reliable and accurate data, which is why the company has partnered with Cboe as a data provider," said Joo.

"Having access to index data from Cboe^® gives DOMINO users a more transparent understanding of market conditions to help them make informed investment decisions," said Joo.

Fast forward to the future

While Fast Forward Inc. currently offers an investment-management tool, the team is setting their sights on a trading and investing platform.

"We are aiming to merge scattered investing information and provide an end-to-end investing experience for all kinds of assets," said Joo.

As a Seoul-based fintech startup with engineering talents from Google/Meta/Naver/Kakao, and backed by Korea’s top-tier Venture Capital partners, the company is well poised for growth.

Optionality Website

Optionality – Re-Imagining Options Trading

"Why does the options trading process continue to be so complicated for retail traders?" thought Alec Baum and Adam Castelbaum, co-founders of Optionality. The co-founders and lifelong friends noticed that adjacent industries had nailed user-friendly mobile experiences. And in their social circles, they saw the trend in more people wanting to jump into the stock market, particularly options trading.

Legacy systems were built more for professional options traders, said Baum – an issue he said intimidated and frustrated new and casual options traders. So, they sought to build a simple, user friendly mobile experience for options trading, and in the summer of 2020, Optionality was founded.

"Optionality re-imagines the entire trading process for casual traders," Baum said. Using Optionality, users are able to compare multiple, potential trades in a pre-packaged menu, pre-filtered for liquidity and expiration.

"Our proprietary mobile platform is focused on increasing the transparency and accessibility of the options trading space, while at the same time providing helpful and useful data," Castelbaum said.

Optionality subscribes to Cboe EDGX Exchange data to help provide that transparency to users. "Speed and accuracy are everything, so using Cboe's real-time market data allows us to show our users accurate prices so they can remain agile and in tune with the market," Baum said.

Optionality is driven to create the optimal user experience no matter the user's risk tolerance. "We feature a menu of pre-packaged spreads to help casual traders, and for users with more active positions, we have built proprietary 'auto-close technology' to help automatically close positions prior to expiration," Baum said.

Additionally, there is no shortage of new features the Optionality team is developing. "We are already hard at work on community engagement upgrades like and in-app chat, and market expansion opportunities, like cryptocurrency," Baum said.

The Optionality team feels fortunate to have passionate employees and helpful advisors that have established a fun and collaborative workplace culture.

Optionality is available on iOS and Android via the Apple or Google Play store, respectively. You can learn more about Optionality by following them on Instagram @optionalityapp.

Endex Website

Endex: The Social Index App

"There's gotta be a better way to do this," thought Brittany Wright and Kevin Loo, co-founders of Endex. The two investment professionals had been sharing stock information with family and friends via a group chat — information that included weights, risk summaries and timing. While keeping all that information in a notes app, they knew there had to be a better way of doing it. They also wondered if they could be compensated for their contributions.

After listening to the needs of many investors, Wright and Loo decided to quit their jobs to pursue Endex full-time.

Your Index Playlist

Endex's broker-agnostic, social-investment platform enables users to create, share and copy custom stock indexes (endexes).

"You can think of an Endex like a playlist of stocks," said Loo. "On Spotify you can create themed playlists based on genre, mood or activity, and easily share them with other listeners."

Endex provides a similar model in which users can create custom stock portfolios based on anything from industry, technology or ESG to additional value considerations, and easily share them with other investors.

The ability to create and share custom portfolios enables investors to discover and copy strategies that match their interests, values, risk tolerance and other investment needs. Everything about Endex is customizable from the name, description and privacy to the individual stock components, weighting methodology and tags.

Because Endex is broker agnostic, users can even copy custom stock portfolios directly through their current brokerages via Endex's integrations.

Making Money

Users who create quality content and Endexes can monetize their profiles through subscriptions and tips, for when the winners are feeling particularly generous.

Endex also rewards its users by giving them a percentage of Endex's revenue when their Endex reaches the app's leaderboard.

Getting Real (Time)

Endex needs real-time data for its end users and subscribes to Cboe's U.S. equities data for top-of-book quotations, matched trade price, volume and execution time of stocks.

"By leveraging the Cboe EDGX Top Feed's low bandwidth and processing requirements, we are able to give our users seamless, accurate and timely information about the market," said Loo.

Looking Forward

Endex is continuing to improve its offering. Currently they are working on providing key metrics, including the Sharpe, Sortino, Return Retracement Ratios, for transparency into a portfolio's or strategy's past performance. Additionally, Endex will be rolling out feature-paired integrations with some of the top U.S. brokerages that offer fractional share trading.

SkinGame Website

SkinGame: Profitable trading, verified

SkinGame was designed by Founder/CEO Kevin Blount after years of trading stocks with the assistance of social media platforms. The ups and downs of trading gave Kevin two key observations. First, traders on social media lack credibility and transparency. And second, only a small percentage of social media personalities are successful investors, and it is unclear which ones turn a profit.

To tackle these issues, Kevin focused on one question, "What is each trader's track record?"

While such data exists for professional analysts, it was missing from social media. And thus, SkinGame was created.

SkinGame is the first social media app to measure the accuracy of stock-specific opinions, in a calculated track record, without brokerage links.

"Trading is difficult," said Blount. "We are looking to help the retail trader make informed investing decisions with the guidance of proven, profitable traders," he said.

"At the same time, we promote the most successful investors who are consistently making the right calls," he said.

Calculating Success

SkinGame's Smart User feature is the backbone of the app. All bullish and bearish opinions are stamped with a user-defined timeframe, and then recorded in a personalized Smart User profile.

Smart User data is used to calculate the success rate and average return for each trader's predictions. The top 30% of traders are labeled Smart Users, and the very top traders are ranked in a daily leaderboard.

The app provides a Smart User analysis for each trader and stock-specific message boards to discuss up-to-date trading ideas.

The competition is serious, but the app is designed to be fun with the option to upload gifs, photos and videos.

Current and Accurate Data

SkinGame uses Cboe U.S. equities data to provide real-time data.

"Real-time stock quotes from Cboe are a requirement to stay updated on market movements with current and accurate data for every ticker asset," said Blount.

SkinGame provides customized watchlists, candlestick charts, sentiment data, and long-term price targets for all U.S. equities and Bitcoin.

Blount said SkinGame is working on adding all major cryptocurrencies to the app as well as expanding into additional global markets.

Try It for Free

The SkinGame app is free and is available for iOS and Android. Data from the app is not sold to financial institutions.

Rakuten Website

Rakuten Trade — the forefront of digital trading in Malaysia

Rakuten Trade started with one mission in mind — provide the comforts of a traditional broker while disrupting the industry, bringing everything online with the lowest brokerage fees in town.

A joint venture between a Malaysian company — Kenanga Investment Bank Berhad — and a Japanese one — Rakuten Securities — Rakuten Trade was the first to offer local investors a completely digital trading platform.

"Adopting a fintech business model successfully reduced the barriers to trading for our customers," said Mr. Kazumasa Mise, CEO at Rakuten Trade.

"We've made access to investing much easier," said Mise. "Our efforts continue to be well received among local investors especially with young adults looking to dip their toes into the investment pool."

Cash Upfront

The Cash Upfront account is Rakuten Trade's most popular product. Approximately 80% of Rakuten Trade accounts are Cash Upfront accounts. Cash Upfront trading operates like a debit card, allowing you to trade using only the cash available in your account.

"This means your trades from the account are fully funded by the deposits you make into your Cash Upfront account while the remaining balance is placed in a Trust account held by Kenanga Investment Bank," said Mise.

Recently Rakuten Trade expanded its digital trading services to include foreign equity trading on its next generation Cash Upfront account. Rakuten Trade clients can now trade in Malaysia and the U.S. via the same familiar trading platform with the same low brokerage rates.

U.S. Markets

The U.S. equities market is the first foreign market Rakuten Trade has offered on its platform. To power the company's foray into the U.S. markets, Rakuten Trade takes the Cboe One Feed. The Cboe One Feed comprises data from Cboe's four U.S. equities exchanges to provide a broad view of the U.S. equities market.

Rakuten Trade feeds Cboe's market data through a vendor and distributes it to its retail clients.

Innovating for Customers

Rakuten Trade strives to provide convenience to investors with easy-to-use and innovative services and a client-first mindset. The company continues to expand its offering to add value to its customers that includes a reward eco-system, access to digital execution and settlement of trades, as well as research reports and educational content.

WSOT Website

TRADANTS | WSOT.com - A Global Trading Game

TRADANTS was established in July 2021 with the bold vision to democratise capital markets by merging financial trading, esports and skill-gaming into an epic global game.

With the launch of its WSOT.com (World Series of Trading) platform, traders around the world can hone their trading skills by competing against each other in a series of free-access paper trading tournaments.

WSOT.com

WSOT.com allows its users, also known as ‘playtraders,' to compete within a wide range of financial instruments and asset classes including forex, equities, indices, cryptos, precious metals and commodities.

Playtraders compete to win real cash prizes without investing their funds by participating in zero-spread competitions.

"We are also developing a proprietary NFT Marketplace where tournament winners can collect and exchange unique pieces of art using the popular blockchain technology," said Lars Gottwik, Founder & CEO of TRADANTS GmbH. This will allow WSOT.com to offer an immersive digital experience to a highly engaged audience interested in gaming, art and online financial trading.

TRADANTS uses Cboe U.S. and European equity feeds as a source of real-time data for its WSOT.com Playtrading arena. Despite no real executions happening in the trading tournaments, the furious battle between playtraders for the prize pools totaling more than $1,000,000 creates exciting real-time trading experiences.

"Thanks to the strategic collaboration between Cboe and TRADANTS, skill-gaming tournaments meet the world's biggest exchanges for real-time play on WSOT.com," said Gottwik.

The TRADANTS Roadmap

TRADANTS has a very ambitious product development roadmap for WSOT.com that includes membership level upgrades for registered users, teamplay functionality, organisation of large-scale, post-Covid-19 physical events, the release of Pro Insights video series, and the launch of a proprietary mobile trading application.

Gottwik said everyone who wants to join the trading gamification journey is more than welcome to reach out and discuss a potential partnership. "We have an audience of fintech early-adopters, gamers and retail investors, and WSOT.com offers sponsorship and advertising opportunities covering a wide range of media formats," he added.

Zingeroo Website

Zingeroo – Competitive, Real-Life Trading

Zingeroo's path to existence had a less than usual beginning. The idea started after a debate among siblings. CEO/Founder Zoë Barry was working for a hedge fund when she found herself in a debate about the direction of the stock market with her brothers — college students taking economics courses.

To settle the debate, Barry tried gifting a competitive, social trading experience to her brothers that Christmas…only to find one didn't exist.

"How could there not be a way to do real-money trading, banter with each other, and track a leaderboard of individual trades?" Barry said about the experience.

"We wanted to compete and track performance on individual trades. I thought the idea was so obvious; it was like inventing the Post-It^® Note. Voila, Zingeroo was born," she said.

Now Zingeroo seeks to revolutionize competitive and social trading. Aimed at current and new traders, the Zingeroo app is an all-in-one, real-time trading platform. Users can make equity and options trades, build trading teams and compete with friends.

Real-Time Data

Real-time data was a must for this app. Zingeroo partnered with Cboe to offer U.S. options and equities data from Cboe's exchanges. Cboe's real-time quote and trade data makes it possible for Zingeroo to provide accurate and timely market data for its users.

Let the Competition Begin

Users can compete in Zingeroo through two features: Zingeroo Zones and Zingeroo Bullpens + Chats.

Zingeroo Zones are optional, free events users can enter to see how their portfolio competes against other users. Participants can enter their entire portfolios for the competition or select their top stocks and options positions. Coming soon, there will be various sector-specific Zones.

Zingeroo Bullpens + Chat is the company's solution to providing users the opportunity to truly invest with their friends. The feature allows you to create a private area for your group. Within a Bullpen, users can build a Zone, similar to the Zingeroo Zones, but only accessible to members of that Bullpen.

An in-app chat feature provides the ability to share trading knowledge, stay up to date on shared news and exchange friendly banter with fellow Zone participants.

Zingeroo continues to work on enhancements to improve the app, including new Zone types and $0 commission equity trades.

Zingeroo is a fully licensed broker-dealer. All securities and investments are offered to self-directed customers by Z-Squared. Z-Squared is a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority ''FINRA."

Polygon Website

Polygon.io – Market Data APIs

Polygon.io was founded out of a need for market data APIs. In 2016, Polygon's founder and CEO set out to apply machine learning to market movements, but he quickly realized the only pricing data available to individual developers via an API at that time was either outdated or too expensive.

Upon that realization, Polygon was born. Now Polygon's mission is to advocate for developers by making market data more accessible.

API Availability

Polygon enables some of the largest technology and financial firms in the world to easily access market data.

Partnering with Cboe Global Markets, Polygon sources Cboe's EDGX Exchange data for its Enterprise U.S. Equities APIs.

"We use Cboe's price data to offer a full suite of financial market information to fintech startups and companies wanting to display U.S. Equity data within websites and mobile applications," said Jack Bell, Head of Business Development. "We're a one-stop-shop for all of the data needed to create the next generation of fintech applications," he said.

Polygon also supports APIs for U.S. Options, Forex, and Cryptocurrencies.

Data from Polygon APIs include real-time and historical trades, quotes, and reference data.

Keeping the Developer in Mind

Polygon's most popular product is its Stocks Developer subscription. This API allows non-professionals to access real-time and historical tick data, company financials, news, and much more. The subscription is available through easy-to-use RESTful APIs and Websocket streams.

Future Enhancements

Polygon plans to expand into additional asset classes and will start by offering self-serve OPRA data APIs for both real-time and historical options data. Polygon's official options products are set to release by the end of 2021.

Investagrams Website

Investagrams – Changing the Landscape

The mission for Investagrams is clear — change the financial landscape in the Philippines.

With less than 1% of the Filipino population investing in the stock market, Investagrams set forth to change that by launching their financial charting platform in 2014.

"Day by day, we are enabling more and more Filipinos to invest in the financial markets by providing the best charting platform in the country, top-notch educational courses on investment — and more than anything — a community geared toward holistic improvement," said JC Bisnar, CEO.

Charting Platform

Investagrams' charting platform is built for both beginning and experienced traders, offering market tools for equities in the Philippines, U.S., and Singapore, to cryptocurrencies, to FOREX, and to commodities.

Within their platform users can monitor, screen, and systematically journal their trades to significantly improve a trader's performance.

"Our users spend 80% of their time in our platform, analyzing the market, creating trade plans, and improving their craft to succeed," said Bisnar. "We have incorporated and built multiple features including watchlists for multiple markets, a bull and bear meter, watcher alerts set by technical indicators, a screener for both fundamental and technical factors, and a very reliable chart to help you with all your trading paraphernalia." he said.

Making the U.S. Market Accessible

"Cboe's real-time BZX Top exchange data delivered via the cloud is our gateway to reaching greater heights by offering one of the most heavily traded financial markets in our charting and analytical tools," said Bisnar. "We are inviting more users globally to give our charting platform a try and make better informed decisions to succeed in the U.S. equities market."

Investagrams is one of the first platforms to take real-time Cboe U.S. equities data via the cloud.

Getting Investors Going

Investagrams offers services beyond their charting platform. The company has multiple educational courses, a social community, and a virtual trading platform that even includes a game to help users test their trading strategies and compete with one another. The best part — most of these are for free.

Bisnar says "Investagrams is looking at new features while holistically improving its existing features. Compatibility with new data, empowering users to chart, trade, and monitor multiple markets worldwide all in one platform are just some of our projects in the pipeline.

"We are inviting everyone to experience our platform, accessible both via website and via our mobile app" said Bisnar. "May your trading success start with Investagrams."

Futu Website

Futu - Global Financial Services Platform

Futu Holdings Limited ("Futu") is transforming the investing experience with its fully digitized brokerage and wealth management platform. Futu and its subsidiaries provide investing services, including stock trading and clearing, margin financing, wealth management, and market data and information.

Futu also provides interactive social features to individual investors for Hong Kong SAR, U.S., China Connect and Singapore stocks through its proprietary one-stop digital platforms Futubull and moomoo. Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) solutions and IPO distribution services are offered by the company through its enterprise service brand FUTU I&E.

Futu has developed a network centered around its users. That network provides connectivity to investors, companies, analysts, media and key opinion leaders.

In order to provide better quotes for its global users, Futu began providing stock, index and derivatives data from Cboe Global Markets in 2018. Futu provides Level 2 data from three of Cboe's U.S. equities exchanges: BZX, EDGA, and EDGX Cboe's retail-focused exchange. Futu is one of the few brokerages offering Level 2 exchange data from multiple Cboe U.S. equities exchanges.

Futu's mission is to become an influential, global financial services platform. Futu is on a path to achieve that mission by adhering to its principles of prioritizing users and the user experience, innovating across its business, and enriching its products and services offering to meet the evolving needs of investors, companies and the industry

Futu conducts business based on the compliance qualifications of the global mainstream financial markets, and continually works to enhance its market data offering for users.

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Global Prime Website

Global Prime - Transparent Trading Meets Technology

Global Prime is a trading technology firm with multiple trading and technology platforms that enables it to deliver bespoke solutions to a global client base. Founded in 2010 with a goal of democratizing financial markets, Global Prime has worked to enhance its products and services, offering industry-leading pricing and liquidity to both retail and institutional clients, with an emphasis on transparency, honesty and a commitment to excellence.

Global Prime Offering

Global Prime partnered with Cboe U.S. Equities to provide data from Cboe's EDGX Exchange. Real-time EDGX pricing data is disseminated into Global Prime's TraderEvolution platform via their Prime XM Xcore.

"Global Prime takes immense pride in partnering with Cboe and is excited to offer our clients an equites product with the same level of transparency and excellence in service that our clients have become accustomed," said Jeremy Kinstlinger, Director at Global Prime.

"We look forward a long lasting and prosperous partnership rooted in our shared commitment to innovation and growth," said Kinstlinger.

In addition to its equites offering, Global Prime covers all major markets including FX, commodities, indices, crypto and bonds. With two prime broker relationships and licenses with ASIC (Australia), FSA (Seychelles) and VFSC (Vanuatu), Global Prime provides margin-trading services to retail clients and offers Prime of Prime services to a range of institutional clients.

Trade Receipts

Global Prime is an industry leader in trade transparency and offers an exclusive feature called trade receipts. Trade receipts enable clients to query vital information about their trades such as execution speed, fill rate, latency, slippage, tick data and other trade metrics.

Most importantly, trade receipts enable clients to see which bank or non-bank liquidity provider filled their trade. Clients can also see the state of the order book at the time of their trade, which instills confidence and a unique insight into the backend mechanics of Global Prime's broking model.

Coming Soon

Global Prime is in the final stages of testing with Trading View, a popular multi-asset charting and trading platform. This will enable Global Prime clients to trade FX, metals, indices, commodity futures, cryptos and U.S. equities via the Trading View platform, making the Global Prime Trading View offering one of the most comprehensive in the industry. Global Prime is also looking at adding Australian equities to its product offering by taking Chi-X Australia market data.

ORTEX Website

ORTEX - Make smarter trades with the stock data and ideas platform

Investors looking for timely and accurate data sets, unique analysis and trading ideas should turn to ORTEX.

ORTEX is a platform created from the recognition that investors needed help keeping track of all the moving parts of their stock investments.

"There were so many unique data set offerings emerging," said Peter Hillerberg, co-founder of ORTEX. "We knew that by combining and integrating that data, we could provide customers with a clearer picture of what was happening in the markets, particularly with their own investments," said Hillerberg.

Popular Data Sets

The ORTEX platform offers dozens of data sets to its users. The most popular being its short-term trading signals, which uses all ORTEX's data sets in infinite combinations to deliver truly unique alpha-generating returns.

The company's short-interest data is also popular with users and is derived from the world's largest pool of prime brokers/broker dealers who submit their daily inventory.

"We display all other available metrics such as flagged short interest in Europe and exchange-released short interest in the U.S. to give a complete overview of short sentiment," said Hillerberg.

Real-Time Equities Data

ORTEX uses Cboe BZX U.S. Equities Exchange and European Equities top-of-book data to keep users informed of moves in the market.

"Real-time, intraday data is important to keep our investors up-to-date on what's happening in the markets at any given time," said Hillerberg.

Vast Data & Analysis

Additional data sets provided by ORTEX include corporate and macro events, holdings, index rebalancing, analyst estimates, live index and commodity pricing, and correlation analysis of peers, currency exposure and commodities.

Fundamentals, charting, and screening are also key features of the ORTEX platform.

While ORTEX has built a robust, data-intensive platform, the company plans to provide more data and enhancements in the future.

A new interface will be released in the second quarter of 2021, and the company is adding portfolio integration, stock scores, index rebalance analysis, and a U.S. order book to its offering.

iFAST Website

iFAST - Wealth Management Fintech Platform

iFAST Corp has come a long way since breaking into the online funds distribution scene as a homegrown Singapore Fintech player – more than a decade before the term "Fintech" was coined.

In 2000, when unit trust purchases were mainly limited to big players such as banks and insurance companies, and mostly via offline channels, the founders of iFAST Corp saw a chance to leverage up-and-coming internet trends by bringing the unit trust transactional process online through the launch of its B2C platform, Fundsupermart.com ("FSM").

In recent years, iFAST has put its focus on broadening the platform's range and depth of investment products and services to provide investors with a comprehensive suite of wealth management solutions.

iFAST currently offers access to more than 11,000 investment products including unit trusts ("funds"), bonds and Singapore Government Securities ("SGS"), stocks and exchange traded funds ("ETFs"), and insurance products. The company also provides services such as online discretionary portfolio management services, cash solutions, research and investment seminars, Fintech solutions, and investment administration and transaction services to financial advisory firms, financial institutions, banks, multinational companies, as well as to retail and high-net-worth investors in Asia.

iFAST powers the display of real-time U.S.-listed stocks pricing information on its platforms with the Cboe One Summary data feed. Cboe One Summary data are also used on the company's trading system for internal use, as well as for live online trading.

The most popular features on iFAST's platforms are the Stocks Screener and ETF Selector. The screeners allow investors to more effectively navigate the huge selection of stocks and ETFs available on the platform to help find the stocks and/or ETFs that best meet their investment criteria. There is also a Chart Centre tool that allows investors to compare the performance of selected ETFs across different time periods.

Looking ahead, iFAST plans to offer more advanced order types to cater to more sophisticated investors, as well as improve screener functions.

vigtec Website

vigtec - Where Math, Your Money & the Markets Meet

vigtec is an investment decision-making platform driven by unique algorithms. Originally built as an in-house tool to produce complex combinations scenario mapping for options, the team realized its potential beyond their own use.

"Once we realized how the code base made complex investing strategies simple to use, we thought we could help everyday investors transition from passive investing to active if we took the same premise and expanded it to other areas," said Jonathan Gibbons, Founding Partner, President.

That code base is capable of calculating millions of options strategy combinations in seconds to produce usable investment strategies for any scenario, and for any security that has sufficient options open interest.

The vigtec team began to write other investment decision making tools, such as a unique quantitative Explore search algorithm; vSCORE -- a quantitative scoring system for stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds; a proprietary charting module; unique market indicators, and more.

Ultimately the vigtec team tied it all together with a proprietary algorithm store where a user can pick and choose what investment tools they want to consume. And, they launched the platform in the summer of 2020.

Data behind the algorithms

vigtec uses Cboe market data to power its premium trading tools.

"We use Cboe's BZX and EDGX Top market data feeds to provide data for our Live Charts tool, and Cboe's Market-at-a-Glance API fuels our Options Lab," said Gibbons.

The future of vigtec

Gibbons said vigtec plans to add crypto and futures market data to the platform soon.

"At the same time, we plan to push for mass adoption of our free mobile and web apps and grow the awareness of our vSPACE algorithm store," Gibbons said.

vigtec also has plans to expand internationally. The company is aiming to grow its data reach to Southeast Asia, Central and South America, India, and Europe by supporting exchanges in these and other developed and/or emerging markets with the goal to help make equities easier to explore and options easier to utilize.

Atom Finance Website

Atom Finance - Investment research tools for all

Atom Finance provides a range of cutting-edge investment research tools and content to retail investors. Eric Shoykhet, Founder and CEO launched Atom in 2018 after recognizing a large gap in investment research landscape. Shoykhet noticed existing solutions were either too simple for thoughtful analysis or too expensive for individual investors.

"We sought to build a platform that was not only accessible from a cost standpoint but also incorporated the functionality of professional investment research tools," Shoykhet said. "We believe we can provide that same institutional-quality experience to everyone."

Atom's services are available as a web-based platform and mobile app. Features of the platform include a digital sandbox where users can create financial models instantly, pre-populated with consensus projections; as well as X-Ray, a powerful search tool to help users find references to keywords across news articles, SEC filings, transcripts and more. Users can also collaborate with fellow investors to share important insights with Atom's discussion boards and group chat functionality.

Atom's most popular service is its Portfolio Integration tool. Through Portfolio, users can link their existing investment accounts and see real-time P&L, portfolio statistics, diversification and more. This portfolio information is enhanced by Atom's suite of institutional tools and data.

Atom Finance leverages Cboe's exchange data to provide real-time quotes of U.S. equities for its users. These quotes enable various functions within Atom's research platform including price alerts, charting and valuation models.

"We depend on the reliability and accuracy of Cboe's market data to ensure a consistent user experience for our customers," Shoykhet said.

The team at Atom Finance recently completed Series A funding and is working on new content and collaboration features that will make the platform even more enticing. They're also looking to expand their team in Brooklyn, New York.

Freetrade Website

Freetrade - Start investing, for free

Freetrade Founder & CEO Adam Dodds shares his thoughts on how the company is solving challenges UK consumers face when investing.

Freetrade started when I found that there was no simple, cheap way to invest in the UK. Since day one the goal has been to make investing simple and affordable for everyone, which we are now doing for more than 70,000 customers.

Freetrade offers commission-free access to over 600 US and UK stocks and ETFs via their iOS and Android apps. Both apps allow consumers to open a stocks and shares ISA and will soon add a premium service that enables users to make unlimited trades with instant order execution.

People love Freetrade's core offering of commission-free trading and ISAs - but what they've seen is that it's the little details that really make a difference. For instance, providing a more intuitive portfolio breakdown or making it easier to find different stocks. Freetrade often discuss updates with customers on the Freetrade forum and have made improvements to products based on those conversations.

Freetrade use Cboe Europe's equities market data to show our users the current mid-market price information for UK stocks available on the Freetrade app. This shows them what the current mid-market price is for those stocks.

What is on the horizon for Freetrade?

A lot! Freetrade have just started migrating customers to a new platform - Invest by Freetrade. we have built the entire platform in-house and expect to add fractional shares, European equities and thousands more US and UK stocks early 2020. Freetrade also working on expanding into Europe, starting with Ireland and the Netherlands.

Ninety Nine Website

Ninety Nine - Zero commission investing is coming to Europe

Started in September 2018 by two Spanish entrepreneurs living in the U.S., Ninety Nine was created with the mission of making financial markets accessible to 99% of the population by removing the barriers of complexity, transparency and cost.

Having grown tired of the high commissions traditional brokers were charging, Ninety Nine identified the opportunity to create a commission-free brokerage model.

"For non-professional retail customers, commissions drain a big percentage - if not all - of the profits earned on investments," said Mr. Javier Sanz. "This practice was the main reason many people saw investing in the stock market as something restricted to the privileged few."

Ninety Nine has sought to change this by introducing a commission-free broker model that eliminates frictions and allows investors of all sizes to save more money.

"High commissions affect people with big pockets too," said Mr. Javier Sanz. "When an investor wants to trade larger quantities, the commissions vary as a function of size. This translates to the disproportionate and constant payment of an excessive ‘tax' to financial middlemen that could be substantially reduced by the use of technology."

The commission-free proposal has proven Ninety Nine's most popular feature with a simple and intuitive interface. Cboe's low-cost market data enables Ninety Nine to keep its costs in check. Ninety Nine uses Cboe's European and U.S market data to provide customers with access to real-time prices via iOS and Android apps.

"Traditional players like to complicate the user experience," said Mr. Javier Sanz. "We believe that in today's world it's all about keeping things simple with clear value propositions and outstanding customer service."

Ninety Nine will soon be releasing an online broker feature which will offer commission free trading of both European and US stocks. Other asset classes will be progressively added.

What's next?

Moving forward, Ninety Nine is expanding their commission-free trading model across all 28 countries in the EU.

Invast Global Website

Invast Global – An alternative prime broker

Invast Global is a provider of Prime Brokerage Services globally, allowing brokers, asset managers and hedge funds access to execution, clearing and custody services across a range of global markets in Equities, ETFs, Futures, Foreign Exchange and Precious Metals.

Invast recently launched a fully integrated API solution for brokers incorporating both market data and exchange execution for thousands of Single Stock CFDs. This offering provides clients with live exchange pricing and leveraged, long/short execution capability via Direct Market Access (DMA), to some of the world's most liquid CFD markets. The offering utilises Cboe market data for U.S. and European equities.

James Alexander, Invast Chief Commercial Officer notes, "The Cboe equities data packages offer outstanding value not just for us as data vendor and the point of execution, but also for our broker clients. The fact that non-professional consumers of the data can access US and pan-European exchange data with no monthly access fees means that our Broker clients are able to disseminate this product to their customers in a much more cost-efficient way than has previously been possible. Ultimately this allows for brokers to distribute a more diversified range of products to more clients - which is a great result".

The delivery of an integrated data and DMA execution solution for CFDs is aided by the provision of full operational and technology support functions to reduce the operational burden for our clients. Market data reporting is also streamlined, with Invast acting as the vendor of record to our broker clients. "We feel that providing a streamlined offering including data distribution, DMA execution, ongoing corporate action support, infrastructure set-up and market data reporting is a huge step forward in bringing genuine multi-asset trading capabilities to our broker clients. This diversification should allow them to grow their businesses, even in the face of an evolving regulatory landscape."

dough Website

dough – The commission-free online broker with premium content and insights

dough is a new, online broker and application that offers commission-free trading for listed stocks and ETFs.

Equal parts brokerage, education and experienced insight, dough's mission is to bring understanding to risk – removing it as a barrier.

A New Way of Doing Things

"dough provides powerful investing capabilities and insights that typically come at a high price," said Victor Jones, CEO of dough. Jones says that dough meets the demand as a broker offering investing capabilities and zero commission – investors no longer have to give up one for the other.

Jones is the former director of Trading and Operations at TD Ameritrade. The new venture hosts an impassioned team of industry experts from Merrill Lynch, TradeStation and Goldman Sachs, among others.

Market Data, Insights and Education

dough uses the Cboe One Feed to provide real-time quotes in its mobile application. The dough team also uses Cboe market data for internal analytics that drive their insights. dough says that through their platform those insights can be tailored to a person's interests.

One example is their dough Selects feature in which investors can uncover investment potential in their passions, whether that's video games, fashion, travel or anything in between.

In addition to the personalized insights provided through the application, dough provides daily coverage of the market. Their The 3Cap™ unpacks today's money-moving headlines in less than three minutes and their Stock Report Card provides buy and sell ratings from professional Wall Street analysts.

Click. Link. Invest.

The dough team is proud of its transparent pricing and how easy it is for investors to open an account.

"In as little as three minutes, you can transfer funds from more than 11,500 financial institutions, including Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo. You can open, fund, and start trading in minutes," said Kyle Goad, dough's President of Operations and former Director of Operations at TradeStation.

Gatsby Website

Gatsby – Simple, free options trading for retail investors

In late 2017, Gatsby founders Ryan Belanger-Saleh and Jeff Myers expected a downward move in a U.S. equity stock. Although they had conducted equity and crypto trades in the past, they needed to open an options account in order to trade against the stock.

In a scramble to open an options trading account with a major brokerage house, they soon discovered the platform was not designed for young investors who are new to trading options.

"While options are a uniquely powerful tool to young investors, the available online retail brokerage platforms were not designed to help bridge the learning gap and make options easily available to most traders," said Belanger-Saleh. And, so the idea of Gatsby was formed.

Currently in public beta in the continental U.S., Gatsby is a pure-play options trading platform designed to make trading options simple for both beginners and seasoned traders.

"We created tools with the options trader in mind like our social feed and detailed payout calculator but also made onboarding easy with a jargon-free interface," said Belanger-Saleh.

Gatsby uses Cboe's real-time options data feed to power quote and trade data on the platform. As the largest U.S. options exchange operator, Cboe's data provides the most comprehensive view of the marketplace.

The platform also takes Cboe's historical data to calculate likely outcomes and help users understand the risk associated with a particular trade.

Gatsby's platform is also bringing options trading into the modern era. In addition to the social feed, the platform also sends detailed push notifications.

The social feed allows users to gain trade inspiration from the crowd and be used as a sanity check before making a trade. At a glance you can see what names the community is trading and where the sentiment is on those names.

Belanger-Saleh and Myers are working toward a general launch of the platform in early summer 2019.

"We're big believers in the power of options and the value of pure-play options trading platforms," said Belanger-Saleh. "It is our goal to change the branding around options as a security, and make them more broadly appealing to retail investors by removing the jargon and making the process social and fun. Our goal is to bring hundreds of thousands of new retail traders into the options markets."

Intrinio Website

Intrinio – Financial Data Platform

Intrinio is a financial data platform founded in 2012 by Rachel Carpenter and Joseph French to provide developers and engineers from fintech companies, large institutions, hedge funds and universities with a financial data API that they can rapidly integrate into their applications, websites, widgets, and more.

Today the company offers more than 300 financial data feeds, including international stock data, FDIC bank data, real-time U.S. stock prices, cryptocurrency, futures, fundamental U.S. 10Q and 10K data, and insider transactions.

Intrinio's most popular financial data feed was one of the first data products the company developed – the U.S. Fundamentals and Stock Prices Bundle. This feed includes market cap, gross margin, total revenue, last price, price history, volume, split, EBITDA, ROI, standardized and as-reported financials, company news, and more for over 10,000 publicly traded U.S. companies.

Cboe provides Intrinio with U.S. equities data through the Cboe BZX U.S. Equities Top Feed.

"The BZX Top Feed provides the right mix of affordability and quality that financial innovators need," said Rachel Carpenter, CEO of Intrinio.

Recently Intrinio has been working on advancing their API to make working with their data faster and easier.

"We're always working on expanding the offerings on our platform to power a new generation of fintech innovation," said Carpenter.

In addition to their data products, Intrinio is also proud of the extra support they provide developers. Intrinio created the Developer Program in which qualified developers receive six months of free financial data, as well as support, and marketing promotion once graduating from the program.

oneZero Website

oneZero – Powerful trading solutions to accelerate growth

oneZero is a technology development firm that helps brokerages accelerate their growth. Founded in 2009 to solve technology problems in the foreign exchange market, founders Andrew Ralich and Jesse Johnson have expanded their business to also provide support in the commodities, cryptocurrency, equities and futures markets.

oneZero's EcoSystem is a distribution network that has attracted more than 200 financial institutions and retail brokerage firms. The network allows brokers, prime brokers and hedge funds to distribute their liquidity to a unique client base. Institutions may then use oneZero's award-winning technology platform Liquidity Hub to seamlessly deliver that liquidity to other end-customers.

Liqudity Hub also allows users to manage their trading book and customizes their liquidity through a full suite of tools, including comprehensive credit, reporting and risk management tools.

Cboe is an EcoSystem partner, and oneZero provides connectivity to the Cboe BZX Exchange for retail brokers. Many partners in the EcoSystem rely on Cboe's market data for a real-time look into the U.S. equities marketplace, and are able to report distribution of their data back to Cboe through Liquidity Hub.

oneZero users can also use the Market Data Sentinel tool to report market data distribution back to Cboe. Introduced by oneZero in November 2018, Market Data Sentinel automates the reporting, monitoring, accounting and compliance of exchange market data used on the MT5 platform, streamlining a previously manual process.

"We are excited to introduce Market Data Sentinel to address a real market need around reporting and monitoring exchange market data on MetaTrader 5," said Andrew Ralich, CEO. "All MT5 brokers, whether they currently use oneZero's Liquidity Hub or not, can take advantage of this powerful solution to a previously time-consuming manual workflow process."

Additionally, oneZero offers MetaTrader Solutions for server hosting and support.

oneZero's rapid growth has encouraged its founders and team to continue investing in their technology platform, which has a 99.99% uptime. The oneZero team prides itself on being able to anticipate and respond to new business challenges across asset classes, and they are well positioned to deliver services across the market spectrum in support of evolving market convergence between financial institutions and retail brokers.

Sentieo Website

Sentieo – Financial Data Platform

Sentieo is a full-featured financial data and research platform designed to optimize the equity research process. The platform helps more than 600 customers – including hedge funds, investment banks and private equity firms – simplify their workflow and make better decisions by providing a unique combination of financial, linguistic, and alternative data along with a collaboration tool.

The idea for Sentieo came from CEO and co-founder Alap Shah, a former Wall Street analyst who found himself frustrated with the lack of adequate tools available for the buy-side research workflow. Sentieo was launched in 2016, and two years later, the company processes more than 20 million financial documents from 64,000+ companies around the world.

Cboe powers Sentieo's equity data terminal and launchpad screens by providing real-time U.S. equities pricing feeds. With that data, Sentieo's customers can stay on top of the markets in real-time – without having to go to another terminal or data source.

Shah says that his customers' favorite feature is the ability to rapidly search through millions of financial documents in seconds using the platform's natural language processing algorithms.

"Much of the important information that financial analysts need is contained in unstructured text, which we make more accessible to our users," Shah explained.

"Sentieo's platform is underpinned by the latest search technology," he said. "We overlay search, collaboration and automation on key aspects of an analyst's workflow. That way, our customers can spend less time searching, and more time analyzing."

Sentieo will be enhancing its ability to extract data from unstructured documents using machine-learning technology. Over the next 12 to 18 months, Sentieo also plans to grow its team and expand into existing markets, with a primary focus on the buy-side community.

BMLL Website

BMLL Technologies – Data Science Platform

BMLL Technologies is a cloud-based data science platform for machine learning research and development offering access to historical full depth order book data, unlimited compute power and a wide range of data science and machine learning toolboxes.

Born out of the machine learning labs in the Engineering Department at Cambridge University, it is a platform designed for data scientists by data scientists. You no longer need to buy and curate the data yourself from global financial exchanges, to be able to mine the value out of this trade data.

BMLL holds every single trade and quote (on- and off-book) from Cboe Europe back to January 2016. Users can analyse Cboe Europe data alongside data from other European equity exchanges, as well as futures and options markets. In addition, access to Cboe BXTR trade reporting data allows in depth analysis of off-exchange data as well.

To differentiate from more traditional historical data providers, users do not buy data, compute power and analytics from BMLL they rent it on-demand. Clients, including investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers, academic institutions, do not need to spend hours sourcing, processing and curating large data sets, not to mention support the cost of storing it, as BMLL does it for them.

Via a Python-based Jupyter Notebook interface, clients can use the platform for an ever-growing number of use cases. These include:

TCA / best execution / slippage / market impact analysis
Quantitative research – academic research, signal processing, order imbalance analysis
Algo back testing for P&L purposes
Market simulation for aggressive and passive orders
Compliance testing prior to algorithms going live (ensuring algorithms do not disrupt the market structure)
Market locked status

BMLL continues to add data sets, experience new use cases and develop in-house built analytical packages.

Invstr Website

Invstr. Play-Learn-Invest. App that allows everyone to become an investor.

Invstr engages users via an auto-personalized mobile platform that offers the ability to practice playing investment games, follow instruments, connect with other Invstrs, and trade via partner brokers.

Markets

Invstr carries streaming real-time Cboe equity and index data. It takes advantage of Cboe's pan-European coverage as a one-stop shop for 15 markets in Europe, and large presence in the U.S. Other real-time asset classes include Crypto-currencies, FX, bonds, futures and commodities. Additional regional equity markets are covered in delayed form. Invstr also offers fully customizable market news from top financial publications and commentators.

Users can customize their watchlist to follow instruments that interest them, or are recommended to them, and instantly access related information via each instrument hub. This includes comparison charts with technical overlays and annotation capabilities, news, posts, research and calendars.

Gamification

Users can practice buying and selling investments with streaming market data in a fun and safe way by playing games. They can watch their investment game P&L update in real-time and see where they stand against the rest of the Invstr community through the leader board.

Social

Invstr offers a full social engagement experience. Users can share their opinions, news articles, charts and game performances by connecting with other ‘Invstrs' across the world; and even share across other social platforms including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Investing

Through local broker partnerships, Invstr users can trade for real, including fractional share trading with US broker DriveWealth, LLC.

Service Solutions & Affiliations

Invstr offers co-branded and white labelled solutions to financial and media organizations looking to re-engage and understand the needs of their clients by using Invstr's neural-network recommendation and marketing engines, feature function-based APIs and web widgets.

TickerTags Website

TickerTags – Connecting trending social content to investable companies

TickerTags captures and measures the activity of conversations across different social content. By identifying conversations and themes across a broad swathe of potential channels, TickerTags provides data that can act as an early alert system to factors that could affect market price, all accessible through a mobile app.

In practice, TickerTags maintains an evolving library of 800,000 curated tags (e.g., key products, brands, competitors, topics, affiliated people, places, regulatory threats) that are in turn indexed to 2,500 publicly investable assets. The firm provides a minute-by-minute statistical analysis of the number of times a tag is mentioned across all documents coming from a specific data source. The same is done for online news, product reviews, blog and message board posts, and social video comments covering a robust representative sample of the world's online and social content.

With the recent addition of Cboe's real-time data, TickerTags user interfaces now include price information across all U.S.-listed corporate companies monitored. This helps to identify asset performance — and any price impact — with users able to see how changing sentiments and developing information flow affect prices immediately — as well as a target based on how prices could move, based on current news flow, in the future.

By integrating with Cboe, and using Cboe's data to illustrate fast-moving markets, TickerTags helps to bridge, filter, and measure immense volumes of otherwise noisy and unusable unstructured social data to give users a vastly better view of how information — and therefore prices — could be trending.

While TickerTags is relatively new, early customers of the firm include some of the world's most influential banks and hedge funds. In time, the team plans to release an API product license encompassing regularly updated brand/product mapping relationships to 2,500 publicly traded companies, following strong demand.

missingSTEP Website

missingSTEP – Suite of mobile apps providing real-time stock analysis

San Francisco-based missingSTEP is a leading investment analysis tool provider for the mobile market. The company reaches more than 300,000 users through mobile applications that combine a deep understanding of what traders want with cutting edge app design innovation.

The result is a sophisticated set of tools that ensure users — often expert technical traders — can manage risk easily and on the go. Of missingSTEP's suite of nine apps, Daily Stocks Pro is the most popular, and best known. It was previously named Best Finance App of the Year by Apple, and was one of the top ten top grossing apps in the entire App Store.

An advanced stock analysis tool, it filters all stocks traded on Cboe and identifies those showing the greatest potential for profit. Behind the scenes, Cboe data is used to run technical trading models and to filter and scan the market for predefined technical conditions. "Our goal is to enable our customers to successfully engage with financial markets around the world, which is why real-time, high-quality market data is so vital for our business and our users," says missingSTEP founder Alp Simsir. "The adaptability of Cboe data, matched with Cboe commitment to low cost, is critical for us as we develop and innovate our offer to our customers."

Other missingSTEP apps, like 1 Stock A Day, offer share predictions and community signals for buying and selling securities, while others offer data and signals on the global FX market and commodities complex. All missingSTEP apps share a common feature: they are tailored to the specific needs of users. Because just as Cboe agrees, when it comes to financial markets and market structure, one size doesn't fit all.

What's Next

missingSTEP will make in-app trading available in Q1 2017, underscoring the importance of real-time market data. The company also wants to make its apps available for Android devices, and after significant requests from users, is looking into building a Windows-based desktop platform.

The information on this web page is provided for general education and information purposes only. No statement(s) within this web page should be construed as a recommendation to buy or sell a security or futures contract or to provide investment advice.