Selerity Eyes Hires as Event Trading Renaissance Drives Demand

Selerity Alerts, which was launched earlier this year, identifies events relevant to the interests of each user, and presents these to a Selerity analyst, who determines whether each event is significant enough to warrant issuing an alert to clients.

"We have signed our first set of Selerity Alerts clients among fundamental-based hedge funds... and are growing the number of analysts as a result," says Selerity chief executive Ryan Terpstra, adding that the vendor's team has already grown from a single analyst at the start of 2013 to seven today.

"I think 10 analysts is probably the sweet spot for this year, but that will depend on how rapidly we expand into new geographies and content sets," Terpstra says.

The vendor also plans to hire a managing editor for Selerity Alerts, to oversee the content and the analyst team, and will hire a third member to the service's dedicated sales team, which in the interim will be run by Terpstra, following the departure of former executive vice president of sales and business development Jeff Otten. Otten recently left Selerity to join Chicago-based Narrative Science─a provider of software for creating text stories, headlines, and other forms of text updates from raw data─as vice president of sales, reporting to chief operating officer Nick Beil, to expand Narrative Science's sales and business development efforts, specifically among financial services clients.

In addition, Selerity has promoted vice president of content and research Brendan Gilmartin to executive vice president of content and client services for the vendor's low-latency data service, with responsibility for the product's sales team.

Terpstra says the new hires are being driven by a combination of factors, including increased revenues and use cases for Selerity Alerts, as well as increased use of the vendor's original low-latency events data.

"We have also seen stabilization in the high-frequency trading business... And that is helping our business," he says. "Volumes and volatility are showing signs of getting better, so events are having more effect, [whereas] the impact of events was muted during quantitative easing. Now that the Fed is potentially changing its policies, economic events are becoming more impactful again."

In addition, electronic trading firms looking to diversify their strategies and incorporate event-driven strategies, bringing new potential users to the events data marketplace, Terpstra says.