Retail Trading in Options and the Rise of the Big Three Wholesalers
记录了美国期权零售交易的快速增长，批发商通过订单流付款促成交易，三大批发商占据近90%的订单流付款，零售投资者偏好廉价周度期权并平均亏损。
ABSTRACT We document a rapid increase in retail trading in options in the United States. Facilitated by payment for order flow (PFOF) from wholesalers executing retail orders, retail trading recently reached over 60% of total market volume. Nearly 90% of PFOF comes from three wholesalers. Exploiting new flags in transaction‐level data, we isolate wholesaler trades and build a novel measure of retail options trading. Our measure comoves with equity‐based retail activity proxies and drops significantly during U.S. brokerage platform outages and trading restrictions. Retail investors prefer cheaper, weekly options with average bid‐ask spread of 12.6%, and lose money on average.