The Options Insider

CBOE Trading Volume Hits One Billion Mark for Fifth Year

by | Jan 3, 2013 | Industry

On Wednesday, ?CBOE Holdings, Inc.?(NASDAQ:?CBOE) reported its 2012 consolidated trading volume for options contracts on?Chicago Board Options Exchange? (CBOE?) and?C2 Options ExchangeSM?(C2SM) and futures contracts on?CBOE Futures ExchangeSM?(CFE?) was a combined 1.13 billion contracts.

Average daily volume (ADV) in 2012 was 4.54 million contracts, down six percent from the 4.83 million contracts traded in 2011.?

Last year’s numbers marked?CBOE Holdings’ fifth consecutive year of one-billion-plus contract trading volume.

Spurred by robust futures activity on the CBOE Volatility Index? (VIX Index?) throughout the year, CBOE Futures Exchange ADV doubled to a record 95,600 contracts on annual volume of 23.89 million contracts.

Here’s CBOE’s 2012 volume and December figures:?

  • CBOE?trading volume for the year totaled 1.06 billion contracts versus 2011’s 1.15 billion contracts.
  • ADV was 4.24 million contracts, down seven percent from 2011’s ADV of 4.57 million contracts.
  • December trading volume totaled 71.94 million contracts versus 70.60 million contracts in?December 2011. ?
  • ADV was 3.60 million contracts in December, up seven percent from the previous year’s ADV of 3.36 million contracts but down 10 percent from?November 2011’s ADV of 3.99 million contracts.

Here’s CBOE’s 2012 Market Share?and December numbers:

  • CBOE 2012 market share of total U.S. options industry volume?was 26.5 percent, up 1.2 percentage points from 2011. If the volume from dividend trades was excluded from industry data for 2012, the Exchange’s total market share for the year would?be 27.7 percent.
  • CBOE?December Market Share?was 23.0 percent, up one percentage point from?December 2011?and a 2.0-percentage-point decline from?November 2012. If the volume from dividend trades was excluded from industry data for?December 2011, the Exchange’s total market share for December would?be 24.3 percent.

Exclusion of dividend trades from total industry volume data presents a more relevant measure of the relative trends in the options business, per CBOE in its press release.

CBOE Futures Exchange had a great year and included the following highlights:

  • Last year represented the busiest year in CFE history with annual trading volume hitting a record of nearly 24 million contracts; ADV doubled from 2011 to over 95,000 contracts. ?
  • VIX futures volume set a new annual volume record in 2012 with 23.79 million contracts, up 98 percent from the 12.03 million contracts traded in 2011. ADV for VIX futures was 95,143 contracts, up 99 percent from 2011’s 47,782 ADV contracts.
  • During the year, VIX futures achieved new records in daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual volumes along with open interest.
  • On?December 31, 2012, VIX futures set a new single-day volume record of 212,800 contracts–a first for VIX futures daily volume surpassing 200,000 contracts.?