From left to right: President Chris Nagy, CTO Aditya Relangi, founder and CEO Greg Hammond and front-end developer Adam Erickson.
Thanks to an investment from Prairie Ventures and Invest Nebraska Corporation, investors now have another tool in their utility belts.
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Best Option Trading, an options trading service which has been in development for roughly two years, announced an undisclosed amount of funding Wednesday.
“Modern technology can improve everyone’s experience with options trading,” said Greg Hammond, founder and CEO of Best Option Trading. “Great software can give you the capability of market professionals.”
The funds will be used to hire a marketing employee and commercialize the software, called Orca, for launch.
Hammond and his team also have plans to move into a space in the Nebraska Global building in the Haymarket. They have been working out of FUSE Coworking.
Best Option Trading is a tool that allows people to trade options. It’s designed for everyone to use—beginners to advanced traders. The service aims to mitigate the complexity of options trading.
“Options are contracts through which a seller gives a buyer the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a specified number of shares at a predetermined price within a set time period,” according to NASDAQ.
Chris Nagy, president of Best Option Trading, describes the software like this: “When you tell Orca your market sentiment for a stock, it quickly shows you option strategies a pro would trade.”
Orca will be available to people who have signed up for the free beta version in coming months, and can be used with an existing brokerage account. The idea for the branding came from Hammond’s nautical affinity.
“Orcas are one of the smartest mammals, social and dominant in their environment,” Hammond said. “I thought it conveyed the sense that the company is providing a tool that allows people to coexist with sharks—i.e. financial professionals—on an equal footing.”
Hammond and Nagy have been selling the idea at trade shows, and some of the financial sharks have expressed interest.
“It’s a validation of what we’ve been working on for so long,” Hammond said. “It’s part of the fun.”
The funding announcement is the latest milestone in a long journey for Hammond. The idea came from when he was working at TD Ameritrade and decided a program could do his job better than he could. Idea in hand, Hammond received a $50,000 grant from the State of Nebraska and started developing the idea.
“It’s pretty chaotic,” Hammond said about the process in November. “There’s been a lot of waiting.”
Given that Best Option Trading is working on sensitive data, Hammond and his coding team had to make sure things were near-perfect before they started running simulations with the data.
“It’s massive,” Hammond said. “Like writing a dissertation, I would assume. I’d have to say it’s like writing two masters thesis because I haven’t written a dissertation.”
Because there are so many choices to make when trading options, there is a lot of complexity to handle, especially in a fast moving market, Hammond said.
“It’s a cool problem to solve, that’s what’s been the draw for me,” said Adam Erickson, front-end architect.
Prairie Ventures took notice of the team’s talent and commitment to help people have a better options trading experience.
“Best Option Trading has a matchless understanding of the challenges traders and investors face, and they have developed a brilliant tool in ‘Orca,’” said Greg Dynek, fund manager at Prairie Ventures.
You can sign up for a beta version of Orca here.
Credits: Photo courtesy Best Option Trading.
