Often traders are asked to provide ‘colour’ or identify reasons why stocks are behaving idiosyncratically during a trading session and what the possible catalysts are. Newsflow is clearly one of the key elements behind daily performance but that doesn’t always offer a full quantifiable picture of intra-day flows or other potential investor sentiment driven reasons.
The combined analysis provided by OTAS Alerts, Microstructure and Core Summary offer users much more granularity and content than just simple commentary of corporate news headlines, as is demonstrated in Vodafone Group today.
The Alerts Overlay function on the Return chart above provides a sequenced timeline of events and abnormal behaviour in a stock’s microstructure.
Significantly for Vodafone, two exceptionally low Return alerts fired in red this morning highlighting large under-performance on both an absolute(R) and basket relative(B) basis. Our model indicates Vodafone shares do not typically encounter moves like this intraday and are highly irregular. Statistical outliers in performance such as these can be used to trade more effectively by identifying potential areas of support or inflection.
The most likely reason for the underperformance can be explained by the other alert flag on the return chart. At 8.07am an exceptionally large Dark/Offbook trade printed in 10.55m shares, it was OTC printed through BATS/CHI-X Offbook reporting exchange. The subsequent absolute and basket relative share price performance gives a simple indication on the direction of the trade and the impact of the risk unwind.
The clues to the motivation behind the trade may well lie in the Core Summary detail. For example, this will quickly inform users of the most recent newsflow and any upcoming Events. Vodafone provides a Sales Release in 2 days
