What is crowdsourcing?  Crowdsourcing, a modern business term coined in 2005, is defined by Merriam-Webster as the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. 

By definition, crowdsourcing combines the efforts of numerous self-identified volunteers or part-time workers, where each contributor, acting on their own initiative, adds a small contribution that combines with those of others to achieve a greater result; hence, it is distinguished from outsourcing in that the work comes from an undefined public, rather than being commissioned from a specific, named group.

Well that is very interesting Mike, but what does that mean for us in the options world?  Enter Estimize:

Estimize is an open financial estimates platform that aggregates fundamental estimates from independent, buy-side, and sell-side analysts, along with those of private investors and students. Estimize is more accurate than Wall Street nearly 70% of the time.

By sourcing estimates from a diverse community of individuals, Estimize provides data that is not only more accurate, but is also more representative view of expectations when compared to sell-side-only data sets which suffer from demonstrable biases.

So, great!  All we do for earnings now is follow the Estimize data and when it diverges significantly from Wall Street estimates we make a play?  Not at all, this is just one more piece to the ever-more-complicated puzzle our trading world has become.  Just another tool in the shed.  Should make this upcoming earnings season even more interesting!

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