The LSE Directory / Charting platforms
ORTEX is a financial analytics platform that produces near real-time estimated short interest for equities, alongside securities lending metrics such as cost to borrow, utilization and days to cover. The platform also covers insider transactions, analyst recommendation changes, options data and unusual options activity, index rebalance predictions, a multi-factor stock scoring system, portfolio tracking with brokerage sync, and a news and macro event calendar. Access is offered through a web application, an API, a Python SDK and an Excel add-in, alongside a public site that hosts free short interest lookups and educational content. ORTEX's core differentiator is the frequency and construction of its short interest numbers. Official US exchange short interest reports are published only twice a month with an eight day lag; ORTEX instead combines that official data with daily updates drawn from securities lending activity, sourced from what it describes as a large combined pool of agent lenders, prime brokers and broker-dealer inventory, to produce estimates that update daily and are intended to anticipate the official releases. For European markets it layers in intraday flags as regulators publish short-position threshold disclosures. The company has positioned itself as a cheaper, more actionable alternative to incumbent institutional data terminals, serving both institutional desks and a large retail user base through the same product rather than separate enterprise licensing. ORTEX Technologies Ltd was incorporated in the UK on 26 October 2017, consistent with the company's stated founding year. Peter Hillerberg, who previously worked in high-frequency trading at Quantlab (UK) Limited and Carnegie Investment Bank, is a listed director of that entity and has described himself publicly as a co-founder of the business. The company operates from London (Hogarth House, 136 High Holborn) and New York (430 Park Avenue), and lists NASDAQ, NYSE, ICE, CBOE, FactSet and OPRA among its data and distribution partners. ORTEX rose to wider public prominence during the January 2021 GameStop short squeeze, when its data on shares out on loan and estimated short-seller losses was cited by Reuters and widely republished across financial press covering the event. ORTEX continues to expand beyond its original short interest product into a broader equity analytics suite, including AI-assisted data queries and a growing library of trading signal families (short squeeze, EPS, RSI, MACD and company events), reflecting a shift from a single-metric data vendor toward a general-purpose research terminal aimed at cost-conscious institutional and retail users.
