Speed, precision and round-the-clock access are rewriting the rules of options trading, according to a panel of industry leaders who traced the industry's transformation from paper trading floors to pushes for an always-on, potentially AI-assisted marketplace. At Robinhood’s annual HOOD Summit in Houston, Cboe’s Henry Schwartz and Rob Hocking joined Robinhood’s Steve Quirk for a conversation about the evolution of options trading, diving deep into the increase in expirations and same-day trading.
Moderating the discussion, Cboe's Henry Schwartz, Vice President, Derivatives Market Intelligence, and a 35-year veteran of the business, framed the conversation around zero DTE (0DTE) trading — activity concentrated on an option's final day before expiration. He first clarified that 0DTE is not a specific type of option, but a strategy.
“[0DTE options] are regular options, but they see an enormous amount of activity on their final day of trading,” Schwartz said, noting that while options have existed for 53 years, the growth in expiration-day volume accelerated shortly after retail brokers introduced zero-commission trading.
Rob Hocking, Executive Vice President, Head of Global Derivatives, said the proliferation of expirations grew out of steady customer demand rather than any grand strategy. “If I go back to when I started [trading], obviously, [monthly] expirations were all that we had,” he said, describing how weekly, Monday/Wednesday, and eventually Tuesday/Thursday expirations were added incrementally
“It was kind of like asking for air conditioning in your F-150,” Hocking said. “Yeah, it makes sense.”
Robinhood's Steve Quirk, Chief Brokerage Officer, said the shift reflects a broader compression in investment horizons across asset classes, not a manufactured push toward speculation or products designed to spur trading
“It's quite the opposite,” Quirk said. “Customers are saying, we are interested in instruments that can give us some more precision with respect to time.” He described a trader who is up 40% on Apple ahead of earnings: “I don't want to buy a month-long option. I want to buy a week-long option. I want to buy a day-long option.”
Smaller contracts carry smaller premiums too, Hocking added, which “allowed accounts with smaller capital to also be able to participate” — a combination of precision and affordability he said “really, really helped growth.”
Schwartz added there are more than two million individually quoted options across the market today, up from roughly one million a decade ago — a level of density he said would once have overwhelmed the market's infrastructure.
“It was not possible to handle two million quoted options” with the technology that existed 10 or 15 years ago, he said.
Quirk agreed, noting Robinhood now handles “between 13 and 14 million options a day on average” — almost entirely through a mobile app. “I would have never thought that they could do 99% of that on this,” he said.
Hocking, who was an options trader on the Cboe trading floor before joining the firm, summarized the impact technology has had on this evolution: “Could you imagine trading zero DTE on sheets?”
“We used to have little sheets, scrolls, or things that we would use to price our option trading... It was crazy,” Quirk said.
Schwartz noted that much of that quote volume isn't even meant for human eyes anymore. A liquidity provider once told him the flood of quotes exists “for AI to consume,” not for traders to scroll through. “There's no reason any of you or me should go scrolling through pages looking for the one option that's going to fit your trade,” he said.
The scale of the shift shows up starkly in Cboe's S&P 500 Index options (SPX), where 0DTE average daily volume is about three million contracts and $18 billion in daily premium, roughly a third of the entire U.S. options market. Hocking said the growth hasn't compromised market stability: trades split roughly 50-50 between long and short positions, more than 95% are capped-risk and 60% of flow still comes from retail traders, with institutions making up the other 40%.
“That balance has created massive liquidity pools,” Hocking said.
The panel also pointed to a “0DTE 2.0” already taking shape: trading around the clock. Cboe's Global Trading Hours (GTH) session has set volume records — most recently as the third quarter — Hocking said, driven increasingly by demand from Asia Pacific markets, with South Korea emerging as a leader. Cboe will soon extend GTH to single-name options, starting in the morning hours where demand is strongest.
“I think everybody knows that's coming — twenty-four, seven is just inevitable,” Hocking said.
Quirk said he was once among the skeptics. “I don't want to work all night and make markets for you guys.”
Now he’s a vocal advocate for continuous markets.
“The news cycle doesn't quit,” he said.
The panel closed on what may be the industry's next frontier: KPI-based event contracts, which Cboe plans to launch in October. Rather than trading on a company’s stock price, KPI binary options contracts let traders take a position directly on a company's reported metrics — earnings per share, revenue, units shipped — before earnings are released.
Hocking illustrated the need for KPI binary contracts with Home Depot's most recent quarter, explaining that the retailer “beat on every one of their metrics” but because it missed on guidance, the stock fell anyway.
“If you wanted to trade any one of those different performance indicators and you did it through the stock price, you actually got the opposite result that you wanted,” he said.
The new contracts will cover 23 companies initially, with five or six KPIs apiece, settling to whatever figure the company reports in its SEC filing. Quirk said the appeal is obvious to anyone who has done the homework on a stock only to be blindsided by one overlooked variable. “It's a huge source of frustration because you feel like you put the work in,” he said. “It's another instrument to give you more precision.”
Asked to look five years out, Hocking predicted continued, rapid growth, noting that the percentage of retail brokerage accounts enabled for options trading remains low.
“I actually think we're in the early innings of options usage,” he said. Quirk framed Robinhood's broader mission in similar terms, closing the gap between what institutions and individual investors can access.
“The heart of it is just making sure that tools, instruments, asset classes, strategies — everything that's available to an institutional, more sophisticated, or wealthier person — is in the hands of everyone,” he said.
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