'The Heavy Lifting': How Blackboxstocks Built A Trading Platform With AI, Algorithms

Blackboxstocks Inc BLBXD, a stock and options tool as well as social community, gives traders an edge in an increasingly volatile market, company founder Eric Pharis told Benzinga. 

The Platform 

Started in 2014 by Pharis, David Kyle and Gust Kepler, Blackboxstocks aims to build on a web and mobile trading solution that incorporates artificial intelligence and proprietary algorithms to deliver predictive analytics, real-time insights, charting and social media.

Users can act on data-driven strategies and alerts delivered via algorithmic stock and options tools that reference real-time and historic data.

On the platform, news items can be filtered for specific criteria and users can share insights with other traders via audio or text. 

What differentiates Blackboxstocks from other trading analytics platforms are the algorithmic alerts that incorporate price, volume and sentiment activity to direct attention toward high probability trades.

Blackboxstocks effected a 1-for-3 reverse stock split July 15 and is trading under ticker "BLBXD" until it is complete. 

How Blackboxstocks Started 

After working in the trading space, Pharis teamed in 2004 with Java developer Kyle, a close college friend, and began writing high-frequency trading algorithms.

After some time, arbitrage shrunk, fees grew and the environment became increasingly challenging to compete in, Pharis said. 

Kepler, now Blackboxstocks' CEO, came to Pharis and said he thought the market had an “appetite for a retail product” that delivered high quality trading analytics.

Pharis said he helped build a retail system that took existing infrastructure and morphed it into a powerful trading solution. 

The Blackboxstocks infrastructure utilizes data and analytics stored in servers colocated in New Jersey. These servers read and compare past and present stock data, Pharis said. 

"We kind of try to do the heavy lifting." 

Then, Now And Later

At its inception, Blackboxstocks was rudimentary, its founder said: the user interface was lacking and improvements were needed.

“We hired a few more team members and, then, in 2018, we added the options platform and social media — a consequence of users that were chatting about our platform," he said. 

Blackboxstocks has developed education courses for subscribers that offer an introduction to stock and options trading as well as instruction on how to use the platform.

“We have a bootcamp class that starts with the very basics of trading. What is a bid? What is an ask?” Pharis said. 

As users advance in their education, access to technical content curated in part by the Options Industry Council is also available twice a month.

Though the majority of Blackboxstocks users are swing and scalp traders, the platform now aims to serve the more active investor, Pharis said. 

That means “people that don’t trade every day, but look at their portfolio every day and would like to get a piece of proprietary information that might be about one of the stocks in their portfolio.”

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Photo courtesy of Blackboxstocks.