How Vesica Tech's SHIFT Search Is Making Market Data More Accessible, Actionable

One would likely not purchase a house without first looking at comparable home sales.

That is according to Saad Hussain, founder and CEO at Vesica Technologies, the company behind SHIFT, a search engine for the options market.

“As a former broker, it’s not about the democratization of finance. It’s really the democratization of data. That’s where the money is,” Hussain said in an interview alongside CTO Dr. Alessandro Warth, a former software engineer at Alphabet Inc-owned GOOGL GOOG Google.

Read below to find out more on how Vesica’s SHIFT Search is making market data more accessible and actionable for market participants.

Background: As a broker, understanding market color, informally known as flow, via the real money transactions of the largest and most informed participants, was key in positioning customers to take advantage of emerging market opportunities, Hussain said.

This flow is now accessible for the broader public — albeit at an exorbitant cost.

In allowing more people clarity in the markets at no cost, Vesica’s SHIFT visualizes the activity across options for equities and commodities, as well as futures and options on cryptocurrencies.

“It’s an idealistic way to be able to let anybody, whoever you are, regardless of your background, beliefs, skin color, however rich or poor you are, see what’s happening in the market,” Hussain said in a prior interview. “You shouldn’t have to pay to understand … what are the real transactions happening in the market data, today.”

Evolution: At its core, SHIFT is a visualization tool that quickly reveals trade-based sentiment.

“We’ve even taken complex things such as open interest, which is very guarded and complex data to extract, and made it available to people,” Hussain said, in an example in which he used SHIFT to analyze trade in meme stock Vinco Ventures Inc BBIG.

“It started trending on Reddit and activity in calls came in,” he said, adding that this coincided with a rapid rise in the stock price. “People later started to take profit — evidenced by a reduction in open interest — as we had a rout.”

Graphic: Snapshot of options activity in meme stock Vinco Ventures. The activity was heavily weighted to the call side, or contracts that allow participants to buy at a predetermined price, at some point in the future, a bullish bet, or hedge against a short stock position.

“We’ve since gone through a bunch of iterations,” said Warth, whose career was focused on the intersection of programming language design and user experiences. “I had to change a couple of things in the backend but the platform pretty much scaled.”

Just recently, on a new backend, SHIFT combined the data from eight exchanges, allowing for the ability to analyze trade across a myriad of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin BTC/USD.

“We can basically customize the data you’re seeing based on your timezone,” the CTO said in reference to SHIFT’s commitment to personalization for users across the globe.

“We started putting sparklines — the underlying price — above aggregated options volume,” so users can determine whether or not a stock is directionally sensitive to options activity. 

Outlook: SHIFT is growing rapidly with hundreds of thousands of active users.

“As this is happening, our goal is to continue to expose the data that is valuable to the user so they can make better and more informed decisions,” Hussain said of providing market participants a platform to think about the market creatively.

The development of functionalities that may cater to more advanced paying customers, are in the works amid Vesica’s take on the AdSense program. AdSense allowed the front end of Google — in this case SHIFT — to be free for the public. The firm is also looking to add user accounts and brokerage integrations, as well as education and research.

“It’s not just about trading, it’s about understanding the data,” Hussain said.