Trade Alert Grows 13F Capabilities

New York-based Trade Alert, a provider of options trade data and related content via instant messaging, has improved its capabilities around 13F filings data to allow users to get more value from the reports—which show investment firms’ quarterly options holdings—by being able to track specific filers.

Henry Schwartz, president of Trade Alert, says the vendor has reorganized the way it processes and displays 13F data—which it sources from WhaleWisdom.com, a portal that parses and collects information from 13F filings to determine which funds are buying or selling options positions—to alert sales traders when new forms are filed, to tag trades with the names of clients who have holdings in a particular option and would be interested in the activity, and to enable users to dig into clients’ options trading flow.

The service covers the 530 or so funds that disclose options positions, out of the thousands of companies that file 13F forms, and makes the publicly-available—but hard to access—data easier to use and available in real time, Schwartz says. Trade Alert developed the new feature based on its basket function that allows users to manually create interest lists of companies in the system, after seeing some clients populate their lists with 13F filings, he says.

Users can access the data on a filer-by-filer basis that gives users a menu of top trades, most active stock options, largest open interest changes and positions, an option bucket report, sentiment, option volume breakdown, unusual option volume and color, or can receive an alert whenever a company issues a 13F filing, with a paragraph of auto-generated commentary about the number of positions reported, top positions by size and value, and what percentage of the positions are puts or calls.

Schwartz says there is too much room for error to compare filers directly, but says the vendor could also add a comparison of a 13F to the same company’s previous filings, so users can see whether a customer is increasing or decreasing its holdings, for client prospecting purposes. Similarly, users can also customize alerts to display trades above or below a certain amount that a specific client would be interested in.

“It’s perfect for salespeople who are trying to make clients feel like their interest is being represented. Being able to stay aware of what customers are involved with in real time helps them do a better job with their customer base,” Schwartz says. “Their goal is to show the right ideas to customers to generate business. 13Fs are a disclosure by big customers of what they are involved in, so taking that data and putting it in an easy, organized format… helps them understand what trades and information are useful to customers.”