The Roots of the Options Trading Revolution

Articles From: Barron's
Website: Barron's

Fifty years ago, an options trade ignited a multidecade reaction that changed how everyone invests.

It is doubtful that any of the 120 or so people who gathered to watch the Chicago Board Options Exchange’s opening on April 26, 1973, fully understood what had been unleashed.

The first trade on America’s first options exchange was bullish. Someone bought a Xerox (ticker: XRX) July $160 call option contract. Only calls traded and only on 16 stocks, including AT&T (T), Ford Motor (F), McDonald’s (MCD), and Texas Instruments (TXN). Opening-day volume was a mere 911 contracts, far less than the 45 million contracts that now typically trade daily in the U.S. options market.

It was a modest moment in a provincial market hub that was about to show the world that it was home to some brilliant traders who wanted to be busy when agricultural futures markets idled. They thought equity options were countercyclical to their main business, so they created what is now Cboe Global Markets and effectively did away with brokers who traded options over phones without an exchange.

Cboe grew slowly. Puts were listed in 1977. Regulators were wary, but many investors got it. Options exchanges opened in New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.

The Black-Scholes model, unveiled in 1973, standardized options pricing and improved a method that blended historical prices with what brokers thought investors would tolerate. Thomas Peterffy, a Hungarian immigrant, created the first hand-held computer that dynamically priced options. At the time, dealers based their prices on static data printed on paper. Peterffy and his market-making firm, Timber Hill, introduced the technology at New York’s American Stock Exchange in 1983.

Cboe’s members quickly banned Peterffy’s technology to protect their profitability. He prevailed by agreeing with exchange executives to support S&P 500 index options trading, which was dying because no one traded it.

Other dealers imitated Peterffy’s technology. Proprietary pricing models were created. The world’s banks saw what was happening, and that changed how Wall Street traded and managed risk. O’Connor & Associates, one of the first great derivatives firms, is now part of UBS (UBS). Goldman Sachs Group (GS) bought Hull Trading and Spear, Leeds & Kellogg.

Peterffy remained independent. He sold Timber Hill to a hedge fund in 2017 to focus on Interactive Brokers Group (IBKR), an electronic brokerage firm he founded in 1977.

The Cboe experiment inspired options exchanges to open in cities such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Frankfurt, London, Osaka, Paris, and Zurich. They were often independent of the old stock exchanges that usually fought change. (William J. Brodsky, who modernized Cboe, is chairman of my firm, Options Solutions.)

Volatility has always been the essence of options, but it bewildered most everyone until the Cboe Volatility Index‘s introduction in 1993. The VIX rendered volatility into an understandable number. It was later dubbed the fear gauge, which captured the public’s attention and turned it into a global benchmark. The VIX morphed again, into futures and options contracts, formalizing the international volatility market.

Thousands of changes have sparked and converged and spread since that distant spring morning. Technology killed the trading floors while democratizing financial opportunities. The world’s exchanges have ceased to be financial fiefdoms united against change. They became electronic cathedrals of capitalism, and much of the credit rests on Cboe’s cornerstone.

Originally Posted April 26, 2023 – The Roots of the Options Trading Revolution

Steven M. Sears is the president and chief operating officer of Options Solutions, a specialized asset-management firm. Neither he nor the firm has a position in the options or underlying securities mentioned in this column.

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Disclosure: Options Trading

Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors. Multiple leg strategies, including spreads, will incur multiple commission charges. For more information read the “Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options” also known as the options disclosure document (ODD) or visit ibkr.com/occ