PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla.-(JLN)-June 9, 2025 – In the world of options trading, where fortunes can hinge on a single tick, Matt Amberson, CEO of ORATS, has a front-row seat to the market’s latest plot twists. At the Options Conference in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, Amberson described a landscape transformed: “Clients have been able to kind of cruise for a while with the market going up and not too many volatility spikes, but now we’re having record days every day it seems like. People need now to be a little bit more nuanced in the strategies that they’re doing, and ORATS could really help them with that.”
Amberson, himself a former market maker, knows the value of a good backtest. “We have a number of backtesting tools—they could look at the strategies that they’ve developed or that they’re trading, or developed on ORATS to trade, and then they could use certain signals or our proprietary indicators in order to develop timing on when to get in and when to get out,” he said. “It’s not something that you could just be in the whole time, and you need to get out at certain times when volatility starts to spike.”
Retail traders, Amberson noted, have arrived in force—and they want things simple. “We’ve changed our APIs to be very user-friendly. You could basically plug in a URL into a web browser and get data, so it’s very easy for retail or any quants really to be able to get the data from ORATS,” he said. “Many of our friends and competitors that have worked with institutions—streaming data, websockets, more difficult implementations—we’ve gone to a simpler implementation, cloud-based, so people can access the data relatively easily. That’s led to a lot of our success in the retail segment.”
Amberson has been watching zero days to expiration (zero DTE) options closely. “One of the things that I’ve talked about since the onset of zero DTE… is what happens to the market-making community,” he said. “Typically, market makers are short puts, so they have to raise the price of puts, and they’re long calls because everyone’s overwriting calls. But what happens with zero DTE is, there’s a lot more participation that’s selling puts to them… and we see this in the put-call skew.” When volatility spikes, Amberson observed, “retail and people that are trading zero DTE are less likely to sell puts, and so the market makers raise the skew back up on the puts.”
ORATS’ edge, according to Amberson, is its blend of backtesting muscle and proprietary analytics. “We have hundreds of proprietary calculations, and now what we’ve done is we’ve married our back tests—we’ve run 275 million precanned back tests for people—and then a user can pick from those and bring them over to our proprietary calculations and be able to see… when to get in and when to get out,” he said. “We have p-values and good statistics in order to determine: Is this a random event, or do we think that this back test could really hold up in real-life trading?”
Regulation, as ever, is a moving target. Amberson worries about late exercises on American-style options, which can catch retail traders off guard. “We actually steer them away sometimes from zero SPY, the ETF, towards the cash settled because of these late … exercises that can happen on an American option… Retail, they’re not sticking around till 5:30, but you know the back office of other places are, and we’ve seen huge movement afterwards. So that, I think, is a huge risk to the market—I wish they would do something about that, close that window down.”
And then there’s AI. ORATS’ “Auto” agent is fielding support questions and helping users optimize and forward-test strategies. “We’re doing a lot of automation… so people could sign up for a strategy, find some optimized signals, and then start to automate it and get text messages and all that as they’re going forward… We’re seeing a lot of automated implementation for retail—it’s really being adopted well, and I think that really is the future of trading.”
For Amberson, the message is clear: In today’s options market, the winners will be those who can backtest, adapt, and automate—preferably before the next spike hits.
