Rick Bensignor has joined OptionsPlay as its new chief market strategist. Bensignor, the former Morgan Stanley chief market strategist, joins forces with CNBC contributor and co-founder of OptionsPlay Tony Zhang, offering investors a combined 50-plus years of trading experience to the research team.
Bernardsville-based OptionsPlay is a global analytic platform leading the charge in educating and advocating for the responsible use of options for all investors.
The company has created an interface for understanding complex options strategies and delivers weekly investor education from industry leaders. Bensignor will be leading the OptionsPlay research team to provide investors with macro and equity research to navigate the markets.
“We are excited to have Rick lead our expanding research team and add his extensive capital markets experience. His deep knowledge of financial markets will provide our clients with the confidence to navigate the markets with OptionsPlay,” Zhang said.
Bensignor is well known as the former acclaimed chief market strategist at Morgan Stanley, head of cross-asset trading strategies at Wells Fargo Securities, head of futures, commodities and technical analysis at Bloomberg, and spent 12 years trading in the stock index and commodity futures pits. He was also the first to have taught behavioral finance theory at New York University’s School of Professional Studies. He is also a frequent on-air contributor to CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox Business TV, and creator and editor of pivotal analyses of Wall Street market behavior.
According to a company news release, four out of the past five years, Bensignor has outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500. For the entire year of 2017, the Bensignor Group’s 39 official recommendations generated an internal rate of return of 75.07% for its client investors, while doing so with an exceptionally low average maximum daily closing drawdown of just 0.79%.
In 2019, Bensignor’s institutional trades outpaced the S&P 500 by a factor of over 3.8 times. This track record is an excellent example of the type of counsel OptionsPlay’s 80,000-plus investors can expect and trust from the company’s meticulous recommendations and navigation through an ever-changing market climate.
“Over my multidecade career at some of the most prestigious firms on Wall Street, I have always ensured that my name and reputation stood behind every action I took, every research report I wrote, and every recommendation I made, whether it was given to a multibillion-dollar hedge fund or to an individual investor trying to grow a small account into a larger one,” Bensignor stated in a prepared statement. “OptionsPlay’s goal to educate and advocate for the best ways to use options aligns with my over 25 years of educating traders, portfolio managers, and individual investors on how to take a no-nonsense tell-it-like-it-is approach to consistently making money in all types of market phases.”
