Insights
Expert perspectives and explainers on markets, technology and market structure. Some pieces are available in other languages.
Enhancing swaps liquidity through targeted reforms
Two types of liquidity: The Mississippi River and market makers in agricultural derivatives
PFOF is going away, but the problem isn’t
Latest Insight
Diversity is strength in US derivatives markets
How Japan’s settlement price methodology impacts option expiry
Market structure
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Market structure Lend, borrow, grow: Improving Brazil’s SBL market
We propose steps to modernize Brazil’s SBL system.
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Market structure
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Market structure
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Market structure
Latest
Technology
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Technology Infrastructure-as-Code for Latency-Critical Bare Metal Systems
About the Speaker Leanne Fok is a Senior Infrastructure Engineer in Amsterdam with 15+ years at Optiver. She previously led the Infrastructure Platform team responsible for our internal Infrastructure-as-Code stack and is now leading the Infrastructure Kubernetes project. Infrastructure-as-Code is straightforward in the cloud. But what about on bare metal? In her PyLadies talk, “Infrastructure-as-Code […]
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Technology Building visibility into a CI platform
This article explores how we operate a CI platform on fixed hardware, where auto-scaling is not always an option. It covers how we built visibility into queue times, utilisation, and system behaviour to manage capacity with confidence.
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Technology When Speed and Scale Collide
Data systems are often described along two axes: speed and scale. In practice, “speed” usually means some combination of latency and throughput, and systems are often optimized for one at the expense of the other, sometimes by trading efficiency for raw capacity. Those distinctions tend to break down quickly once systems move beyond simple use […]
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Technology Real-Time Trading Dashboards with Databricks Apps and Dash
Learn how Optiver built real-time trading dashboards using Databricks Apps and Dash. Discover the architecture behind low-latency, scalable insights for fast decision-making.
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Technology Research at Scale: Orchestrating ML for Systematic Trading
Adapted from a technical talk by Rob Hahn, this article explains how systematic trading relies on fast, reproducible research cycles and the engineering decisions that make those cycles work at scale.
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Experienced, Technology Choosing between free threading and async in Python
As host of this year’s first PyAmsterdam Meetup, Optiver welcomed the local Python community back to our headquarters for an evening of tech talks, networking and knowledge sharing. To open the event, Optiver Senior Software Engineer and Team Lead Samet Yaslan delivered a timely talk for developers working on performance-critical systems: “Choosing Between Free Threading and Async.” Prompting his choice of topic was a recent change in CPython, as Samet explained: “Beginning with version 3.13, CPython introduces an option for a build known as free threading, where the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) is removed. The question is: With the GIL gone, do we still need async in Python?” Here’s how he breaks it down, and what it means for your next Python project.
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Life at Optiver, Technology Interning on Optiver’s Austin HFT Team
Former software engineer intern Ethan shares what it was like to build production systems on Optiver’s Austin high-frequency trading team.
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Experienced, Technology Why DevEx matters to Optiver
Optiver’s Global Head of Developer Experience, Cian Lane, shares how DevEx boosts productivity firm-wide: 30% faster CI builds and onboarding cut to minutes.
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Experienced, Technology FPGA Hardware at Optiver: Making impact at speed and scale
At Optiver, hardware engineering isn’t an isolated function—it’s embedded in strategy, driven by collaboration, and built for speed. In this post, one of our hardware engineers shares how we design custom FPGA systems that process massive volumes of market data in real time, adapt to evolving trading demands, and go from idea to impact faster than you might expect.
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Technology Low Latency C++ Systems for Trading with David Gross at CppCon
Watch David Gross at CppCon 2024 as he shares how to design low latency trading systems in Cpp using high performance and concurrency techniques.
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Latest
Regulation
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Market regulation Why trade execution still matters
Now more than ever, traders need to carefully choose the right execution partners and strategy.
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Market regulation A better way to ‘pilot’ financial regulation
Pilot programs allow regulators to test – in a real-world, yet controlled environment – whether a particular market structure reform is likely to have its intended effect.
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Market regulation A little understood cost of trading options in the US
Exchanges use ORF to cover a material portion, but not all, of their supervision and regulation of the US options market.
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Market regulation One key lesson from the latest CCP fire drill
Fire drills are a vital way of preparing the industry to effectively respond to a major default.
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Market regulation Blazing a new Consolidated Audit Trail
Restructuring the CAT in a way that is sustainable, cost efficient and practical.
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Market regulation Latest CFD bans threaten listed products
Recent CFD regulations in Germany and Spain are conflating contracts-for-difference with instruments like futures and options.
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Market regulation A new playbook for Europe’s capital markets
We propose a new playbook for turning Europe’s capital markets into a healthier place.
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Market regulation, Regulatory comments and consultations SEC comment letter: order competition rule
Optiver comments on the SEC’s proposed order competition rule.
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Market regulation, Regulatory comments and consultations SEC comment letter: amendments to regulation NMS
Optiver comments on the SEC’s proposed amendments to Regulation NMS.
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Market regulation CSDR: promising signs from the new settlement discipline regime
Cash penalties introduced under the Settlement Discipline Regime (SDR) are working, early data and anecdotal evidence show. With market participants already incentivized to get their post-trade in order, mandatory buy-ins could introduce fresh risks into the process.
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Market views
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Market views Volatility views: Investors are rethinking longer-dated volatility
For many investors, longer-dated volatility is no longer an afterthought.
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Market views
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Market views
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Market views
Latest
Explainers
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Explainers When size matters in options markets
If you wish to understand the real size of options markets, don’t stop at contract counts.
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Explainers How securities borrowing and lending works
Securities lending is the practice of lending out stocks, bonds and ETFs.
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Explainers Central clearing: an essential post-trade function
Explore the basics of central clearing and learn why it’s an important piece of the financial markets.
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Explainers Orders and the order book
Orders are the building blocks of some of trading’s most important concepts.
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Explainers How today’s stock markets work
Beginning with an order, all the way through to clearing and settlement, here’s what you need to know about how billions of shares change hands every day.
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Explainers A guide to how the European Union makes financial laws
It can take years for proposed rules to become law in the European Union. Here’s our step-by-step guide to how it happens.
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Explainers 5 things you should know about: market-wide circuit breakers
Market-wide circuit breakers are triggered by rapid and extreme price declines in the S&P 500 Index, a widely-followed benchmark for US equities.
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Explainers An illustrated guide to price controls on US exchanges
Well-designed price controls are key in our view to preserving orderly and efficient markets. Given their complexity, we present this overview of the various mechanisms in place across U.S. exchanges.
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SeriesExplainers Call options
What do long/short positions in call options mean? An investor that buys call options benefits when the price of the underlying asset is higher than the strike price of the option at expiry. The writer of the call option has the opposite pay-off potential and receives a fixed option premium when they sell the contract.
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Series
Explainers Put options
An investor that buys put options benefits from this position when the price of the underlying asset is lower than the strike price of the option at expiry. Conversely, if at expiry the price of the underlying asset is higher than the strike price, the option expires with no intrinsic value and the investor’s loss is equal to the option premium paid.
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