CBOE : to Develop Series of Social Media-Based Strategy Benchmark Indexes

CBOE to Develop Series of Social Media-Based Strategy Benchmark Indexes

• Enters into Exclusive Licensing Agreement with Social Market Analytics
• Indexes to Be Based on Data That Tracks Stock-Related Sentiment on Social Media

CHICAGO, IL - June 14, 2016 - Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) announced today that it has entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with Social Market Analytics (SMA) to develop a series of sentiment-based strategy benchmark indexes based on SMA's social media metrics.

SMA, headquartered in Chicago, is a leader in providing actionable intelligence from social media sources. SMA data analyzes social media streams to estimate market sentiment. SMA's patented process extracts relevant Tweets, validates their sources and evaluates their meanings. Metrics are converted into actionable indicators called S-Factors, designed to capture the signature of financial market sentiment and provide a leading indicator of market movement.

CBOE is exclusively licensing SMA's proprietary data to create strategy benchmark indexes and plans to introduce the first index this summer.

'Extracting information from social media to make investment decisions represents a new and promising frontier in strategy benchmarking. We believe that benchmark indexes based on Social Market Analytics' state-of-the-art metrics will provide signals for investors to identify potential investment ideas,' said William Speth, Vice President, Research and Product Development, CBOE. 'Our research suggests that there is a high correlation between the price movements in stocks and SMA's data. Investors could potentially use these benchmarks to build strategies to enhance risk-adjusted returns in a portfolio.'

'SMA is thrilled to have been chosen by CBOE to partner on creating a family of sentiment-based benchmark indexes,' said Joseph A. Gits IV, CEO of Social Market Analytics. 'CBOE is an unrivaled product innovator and a leader in the index space and SMA is a leader in providing actionable social media metrics. We look forward to working with CBOE to create these first-of-their-kind indexes.'

About Social Market Analytics:
Social Market Analytics is a Chicago-based firm that provides institutional investors (banks, hedge funds, brokerages) with streaming up-to-the-minute social media quantification and analysis that can help them outperform the market (see: www.socialmarketanalytics.com). Its patented technology has consistently proved that the Tweets of professional traders can help both institutional and individual traders outperform the market.

About CBOE
CBOE, the largest U.S. options exchange and creator of listed options, continues to set the bar for options and volatility trading through product innovation, trading technology and investor education. CBOE Holdings offers equity, index and ETP options, including proprietary products, such as options and futures on the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX Index) and S&P 500 options (SPX), the most active U.S. index option. Other products engineered by CBOE include equity options, security index options, Weeklys options, FLEX options and benchmark products such as the CBOE S&P 500 BuyWrite Index (BXM). CBOE Holdings is home to the world-renowned Options Institute, Livevol options analytics and data tools, and www.cboe.com, the go-to place for options and volatility trading resources.

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