Catching Big Moves In Stocks Like Tesla With The InsiderFinance Platform

Fueled in part by the leveraged trade of participants sharing highly speculative trade ideas on platforms like WallStreetBets, shares of Tesla Inc TSLA surpassed $1,200 last week.

With options order flow tools, some participants were able to quickly pick up on this activity and trade accordingly.

One such tool is InsiderFinance. Benzinga chatted with the company’s founders — Rob Hibbard and Trey Huffine — to learn how investors could have better traded along with the larger, better-capitalized participants, colloquially referred to as the “smart money.”

Here’s the conversation that transpired.

Benzinga: Tell me about your motivations for founding InsiderFinance?

Hibbard: We’ve always had a passion for entrepreneurship. Trey is a trained quant that would be the one doing proprietary trading, and things like that, on Wall Street. His real passion, though, is in software development. So, he’s been in Silicon Valley disrupting companies.

I’ve been in capital markets, for most of my career, working with derivatives. For the large part of it, my focus was around taking data and making it actionable.

We were trading and learned about order flow, but the solutions out there weren’t meeting our needs. The light bulb kind of clicked and we decided to make a better order flow tool.

What specifically did you want to do differently from your competitors?

Hibbard: It kind of started with the data. Our solution is more focused on what has the potential to actually move markets and be a leading indicator.

After starting there, then it was really about saving time and making it easier for traders to make decisions. That’s where the visualizations come in.

We have proprietary indicators, news with sentiment … and we aggregate the flow, which no one else has done.

The next problem we solved was technical analysis. We built a technical analysis system on top of TradingView with oscillators, algorithms to get precise entries and exits.

The system is pretty robust. How does one learn how to trade with it?

Huffine: Our goal has been to make it simple and I think now we’re trying to broaden that.

So, how can we make this not only for the intermediate to advanced, but beginner to intermediate people who maybe don’t care about options but want to trade stocks, cryptocurrencies, or forex?

Hibbard: We think we can simplify the process and make it accessible. We want to teach people how to properly trade, not just take uneducated positions in meme stocks. That’s a large part of what we’re doing.

So, you have the education, you can trade, and then have a community that’s supportive of you.

You have the aggregated flow, ways to hone in on unusual and highly speculative, so-called lottery-ticket trades, heatmaps, and way more. What’s one really unique aspect of your platform that some may not know exists?

Hibbard: We have dark pool data with a lot of the standard features everyone else had, but then we added things like late buys and sells on non-ETFs.

Huffine: The news with sentiment. We’re analyzing the content of the articles and then, through machine learning, determining if it’s positive, negative, or neutral.

Graphic: Charting with the InsiderFinance platform.

What’s your sole focus? How do you actually differentiate from competitors?

Hibbard: I spent a lot of time with B2B SaaS software and we thought about what are the jobs that need to be done.

What do you do as a trader? What are the jobs that you need to perform to feel comfortable for a trade? How do we automate all of those jobs in a way that you feel confident it’s going to work?

We’re trying to show retail traders that you don’t have to spend hours doing analysis to get to the gold mine. We want to put the gold mine in front of them.

Huffine: We want people to talk and share ideas, too. You can talk charts and feel confident.

A year down the road. Where will you be?

Hibbard: The vision is to be a one-stop shop for retail traders, at any level, to give them the data, the tools, the education, and the community they need to be successful.

Over the next six months, we will be building out this combined system of technical analysis, and then building the community and education around that.

Huffine: We want to balance being incredibly advanced and simple. Whether it’s a notification on your phone or spending 10-hours a day in our chat talking to people, we want you to feel engaged and like you have the tools to be successful in the markets.