Discussion paper

DP17688 Retail Trading in Options and the Rise of the Big Three Wholesalers

We document rapid increases in (i) retail trading in options and (ii) payment for order flow (PFOF), received by the U.S. retail brokerages from the so-called wholesalers in exchange for routing orders to them. 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 the average bid-ask spread of a whopping 12.6%, and lose money on average.

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Citation

Bryzgalova, S, A Pavlova and T Sikorskaya (2022), ‘DP17688 Retail Trading in Options and the Rise of the Big Three Wholesalers‘, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 17688. CEPR Press, Paris & London. https://cepr.org/publications/dp17688