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 receive data.
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 are 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 for a little more than a decade, and he told Benzinga that one issue he always had was trying to figure out what was impacting markets in a brief amount of time.
“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.