ALL WORK
Options RFQ Trading
Moving institutional options trading out of chat and into an interface clients can drive themselves.
ISSUE
Options trading lived in chat
Clients placed options trades manually through messaging apps and voice. Every quote, strategy, and execution ran through a trader, roughly 30 minutes of desk time per trade, so desk headcount was the ceiling on volume. Clients had no live view of their own pricing, positions, or margin, and no way to build a strategy, see a price, and trade it on their own.
SOLUTION
Quote to execution in one flow
An electronic RFQ that lets clients build options strategies across one or more legs, request live bid and ask quotes, and execute inside the existing risk framework. Every quote is paired with its payoff diagram, max loss, greeks, and margin impact at the moment of decision. Positions, quote history, and trade history live in one place, and open structures can be unwound or rolled right from the positions table. Launching on a fully funded model cleared the risk blockers for the first version while leaving room for a more capital efficient release later.In its first 11 months the channel grew from zero to 40+ institutional clients trading every week and over $2B in notional, with daily volume records still being set in month ten. A trade that took about 30 minutes over chat now takes about 30 seconds self serve, giving the desk back roughly a full week of trader capacity every month.
1
Structure ready to trade. A completed multileg strategy shows its cost, margin impact, greeks, and a payoff curve with max loss and max profit, so the client can read the full risk picture before executing.
2
Unwinding a position. From the positions table, clients select the legs of an open structure and unwind or roll them in place, closing exposure without rebuilding the trade from scratch.
