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The options market is moving fast and staying ahead has never been more important. What are the hottest trades, trends, and innovations shaping options right now? What do traders need to watch in the months and years ahead? There's only one place to find out: the Options Industry Conference 2026. Every year, the biggest names in options come together to break down the latest market trends, regulatory developments, new products, and the future of the industry. And the Options Insider is putting you in the front row, bringing you full access to every panel session plus exclusive studio interviews you won't find anywhere else. Get ready, the Options Industry Conference starts now.
Welcome to our coverage of the 2026 Options Industry Conference, live from scenic and sunny Palm Beach, Florida. Should be a great series of conversations this year and we thought we'd kick it off with a banger, which means he has to bring the heat. He's in the hot spot now, Mr. Steve Cork, the chief brokerage officer over there at Robinhood. Steve, welcome back to the show, sir. It's been a year.
It has been a year. Thank you for having me. And by the way, I was reading this 46th annual.
Yes, coming up on the big 5-0, crazy.
Yeah, first year first one was 1980. I just read that.
I may have missed that one or a few subsequent to that.
But let's start. Obviously you mentioned we're here at the conference. It's just kicking off, so you don't really know what the theme is yet. Every year seems like a couple of things bubble to the surface. Last year it was obviously all the hubbub around potentially adding new zero days and whether we should go 24/7. Still a lot of that in there under the surface, but I'm curious from your perspective as you're just kicking off the conference, what are you interested in hearing more about and learning about this year?
Well, I think the intersection of a couple things are really interesting. You brought up zero DTE's, but also 24/7. The whole everything's going 24/7 or at least 24/5. There's so many asset classes that are already there: equities, options on futures, futures, derivatives, crypto of course, currencies. So, if I look at it through our customers' eyes, they want to have every asset class around the clock. There's so much market-moving news that is happening when the quote-unquote traditional market is closed, and I think people are frustrated that they can't react to that, protect a portfolio, or take advantage of an opportunity when that news is hitting. It just seems to hit more and more when the traditional US markets aren't open.
You know, a lot of people are talking about it. You're right. There is an interest on behalf of the user base and obviously technologically it's feasible. Brokers like you guys have already kind of gotten most of the way there anyway. I'm curious, no one really seems to talk about should it at the end of the day, especially from this lens, from the options lens. I mean, this is obviously the options conference. A lot of people have reservations about options trading 24/5, let alone 24/7. But from your perspective, do you think options should trade around the clock?
You know, it's funny. The people that have the most reservations are not from the retail side, they're from the institutional side. I started my career on the institutional side. So, when I was being asked this question when I was either standing on a trading floor or working for a market maker that made markets, and they said you should have more hours, we would say, 'Oh god, we don't want more hours.' Because that meant we had to staff up. We had to think about things. You at least had to be alerted and on call if something would happen. But now that I'm on the retail side, you look at it through customers' eyes, and they just view us like Amazon. Like, why would Amazon ever close? You're electronic. We watched what happened during COVID. Everything continued to trade without human beings on trading floors. A lot of liquidity providers are already trading around the clock globally anyway. So, this isn't new for them. They're trading every other asset class 24/5 or 24/7. So, this is just an extension of that.
So, you're looking forward to getting that ping about your Apple options at 2:00 a.m. because they're blowing up, and that's a brave new world we're all heading towards.
Well, I think the other concern has always been liquidity. You want decent liquidity. We're really rigid with that. Even when new asset classes, new strikes, new whatever, we're pretty particular about making sure we're not putting people in Hotel California trades where they can't get out and there's not proper liquidity. So, I don't want to minimize the importance of that, but I think that's something that's really been solved by a lot of the market makers and liquidity providers that are currently operating in the space.
So, you think if we do go 24/5 and eventually 24/7, you'll have decent markets? I mean, you probably have decent markets at the money Apple around the clock. And no one's worried about that. But what about maybe your next strata of options? Do you think they'll have a decent experience in there?
Well, I think there's a couple things we can do to help with that. You don't have to list every strike. You could minimize the number of strikes, but also even the order types we already do this today. There aren't market orders in after-hour sessions in most products because there's a chance that there's a liquidity gap. And so you just want to protect people. If they want to buy option ABC at $5, they don't really care when they get filled. And if they're not getting an immeasurably worse fill if they just sit there at a price as opposed to a market.
So you foresee maybe some sort of limited pilot where maybe we go around the clock and it's limited to closing and maybe some opening around at the money, no far out of the money strikes.
Well, I think it could also be the names, too. That's a way that 24-hour or 24/5 equity trading started. It actually started with just ETFs because it's very easy for liquidity providers. They can just take the spider and use the S&P future, which trades around the clock, as a hedge. It makes it easy for them to provide a nice tight market. And then they built on it and said, 'Okay, Apple's X percentage of this index. I'm comfortable making a market that's this tight.' And then it sort of expands. But then you also started to get more and more volume from overseas, more and more liquidity providers from overseas, and it sort of fills itself in. So I think that's what'll happen on the option side, same way it happened on the equity side.
So it's been a year since you and I sat across the table. Catch our listeners up who don't follow the day-to-day over there at Robinhood Options. What's the hot thing? What's the new hot thing that you guys have added since we last chatted that is really exciting over there?
I think if I'm just focusing on options, what we've really been focusing on is we're now the number one option player in retail. We're just shy of 600 million contracts in the first quarter, roughly 10 million a day. But the level of sophistication that some of our traders want us to get to, we had a ways to go. We started with a suite of tools that weren't really designed for people who are advancing to the next level of option trading, whether that's conditional orders or multi-leg or all the other things that people who get to a certain level of sophistication are looking for. But we continue to fill that out and provide that for people, and also the education around it because it's one thing to be presented with a suite of tools, but you also need to understand how to use them and in what market conditions they are most useful. So I think that's been very helpful for customers, even analyzing trades before they do that, seeing the P&L, playing with that, understanding what could happen in any scenario, being able to move the variables, whether it's volatility, time, theta, etc., and have a good understanding of what that's going to look like. And then outside of that, it's just been piling on more and more context education, which means in the flow. That's the way a lot of the younger users are really interested in learning. They don't want to go to some long-form page that's off where they're actually taking an action. They'd like to just be able to hit a help button right in the course of the transaction.
That's something you and I have talked about before, the challenge of educating the Robinhood audience because as you mentioned, a lot of them were newer to the option space, kind of going up that sophistication curve. Education is a key component of that, but also the Robinhood audience, a lot of them very mobile forward. You're right. They don't like to sit down for a webinar or go to an in-person event probably.
Okay. Are you doing more Robinhood educational webinars and things?
We've actually started to do more in person and it really resonates. One of the things, we survey everybody after we do these events. We brought together I think a thousand in Vegas last year. One of the biggest pieces of feedback that we got was content was amazing, really bright educators there, good educational sessions, but we would like more time to interact with each other. Because this validation or just learning from each other is so powerful, especially when you're young and starting off. You really want to know how like-minded people or people who think, look like you, or maybe fit the same profile of number of assets and experience, how are they thinking about option trading? How should I be thinking about it? Am I thinking about it the right way? And I think they find that really powerful to interact with each other.
I'll have to come check out this Robinhood option summit out there in Vegas and see what the folks are up to because I would like to see what the bleeding edge is interested in. Because you're right, it's been a challenge trying to engage them. It sounds like your other way of engaging them as you mentioned is kind of in the trading stream, so it's on the trade screen. They don't have to click out to a separate educational tab or anything like that. Maybe they're building an iron condor for example and they're like, 'Well, I don't know. How do I structure these legs?' They can click help right there and that'll connect them to a trade desk person. What is that?
It'll either they can do one of a couple things. They can just keep clicking on help and it'll take them deeper and deeper all the way to a longer form video or article. Or if they get to a point where they're like, 'I'm just not sure what to do here,' they can just click over and get one of our customer service agents who will help them.
Now you mentioned the volume you guys are putting up, which I think the technical term is ridonkulous. So you're 200 million plus contracts a month. Just to see the size that the retail option space has become is eye-opening. I mean we're writing 1 and a half billion contracts a month now as an industry, so I'm sure it will come up at this conference. These are numbers that even a few years ago if someone had sat down where you are right now and said that to me at the conference, I would have probably escorted them to the door and said, 'Excuse me, sir, you're clearly off your meds.'
You and I are kind of the same. I've made this point before. When I competed with Robinhood, my background is I came from Thinkorswim, TD Ameritrade, Schwab. If you would have told me that the number one retail option trading platform is being done 99% on mobile, I would have been, 'No way.' But again, 10 years ago from a technological capability standpoint and the amount of real estate on a phone, I just couldn't imagine a world where you'd be able to do that in an efficient manner. And we're here. And it's here. And that's another reason why 24/5, 24/7 makes sense. This thing is in my pocket 24/5, 24/7. The news is hitting me 24/5, 24/7. So, it's just logical.
Let's talk about some of those 200 million contracts you guys are putting up a month. Obviously, we see a lot of interest in the zero day. Has that been the hot thing over there at Robinhood? What are you seeing in terms of trends with the user base over there? What are they really flocking to these days? What's the hot Robinhood options trend right now?
I'd kind of cut it into two camps. One, what is growing? Zero DTEs have grown. We've had so many panels and discussions and I'm sure there'll be a couple here. Zero DTEs, the duration is shrinking. The point I always make is if you look at any asset class, the duration of the trade has shrunk. The reason the duration of the trade has shrunk is because this isn't 1970. There aren't companies that come into existence and stay in business for 100 years. Things like AI pop up in a year and suddenly they're the largest component on the market. So you better be reactive and you better be quick, and have a duration that matches however long these opportunities persist. So I don't think that's illogical that the timing of how long you need things has shortened. I think there's also been conversations, 'Oh, the exchanges put out these zero DTEs so that people trade more actively.' Exchanges put out zero DTEs because they're more effective. If I have been holding an Apple position for years and I'm up 40, 60% and I know that there is one day where a potential storm earnings might hit, why do I want to buy insurance for a month? I don't need to. I know exactly what day I need to protect myself. This is a precise instrument created for clients who want precise instruments. So I think that's been interesting. The other facet, because I said there's sort of two flavors, is it's more situational. What happens, and this isn't limited to Robinhood, it kind of happens across the option space, when there is more market volatility and turmoil, people get away from individual names and they rotate into broad-based ETFs. The thesis, at least from many of our customers, is 'Hey, there's this tariff thing that happened and the market's down X percent, and we're not really sure which one of these companies or even sectors is going to benefit or not be really materially harmed. However, we think the market down 30% is just overdone. So, what's the safest thing I can do? I can just buy a spider call or sell a spider put or QQQ or whatever it is.' So, there's a rotation that happens away from individual names into broad-based ETFs. You see it in our audience, but we see it in the industry as well. And then, as soon as the market calms, you get the VIX under 20, in the teens, then you see people sort of rotate back to individual names.
Mention the individual names because obviously just in the last month and change we've had the addition of those zero DTE on the single names now, the top names out there. I'm curious, have you seen a lot of uptake in those over at Robinhood? And obviously, they're going to be a big topic of conversation here at the conference. Do you think the next leg is filling out the rest of the week? Do you think we're going to have more names added to the list? What do you think is next for the single name zero day stuff?
I think we're going to see both, but I think it'll be gradual. And listen, you can go online and see that we at Robinhood have not always been that supportive of these. The reason that I had a lot of concerns about the rollout and how we rolled them out was it's introducing expiration risk, and we bear all that risk. We, the broker and the customer, bear it all. So, I understand why an exchange and a market maker wants them, but we're the one bearing all the risk. And there's an easy solution to this: it's cash settled.
It seemed like things were maybe trending in that direction last year when I sat down with these conversations last year. It seemed like there was a big stumbling block towards launching these and it was all the after-hours issues with the stocks. It did seem like a lot of people were leaning towards cash settled. Others thought that might be a bit, you know, that now you have two options chains effectively and that's not ideal either. So, there was back and forth. It seems like they just said damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. First off, it doesn't sound like you were a big fan of that. Have there been any issues at Robinhood so far with this?
No, we haven't, because we're being helped by technology. Automation in the risk control functions has been really good. There still can be events that can really challenge systems, but we've been fortunate and I've been happy. Look, I don't want to, the exchanges and market makers who have been pushing on them. We love the fact that we have very open dialogue about these things. It's kind of like the dialogue is, 'Yeah, we'll get there one day, but let's see how they work and if there are problems.' So, I think we always have disagreements and we do, but it's healthy. I think everybody realizes if a bunch of customers get burned, it's bad for everybody at this whole conference.
Yeah, that's one way to deflate that one and a half billion contracts really quickly. So, it sounds like I won't say you've come around on zero day because I don't think you ever were a skeptic. It was just more of the after-hours risk and expiration risk. Would you say now that even this time last year at the conference people were still a little hesitant about whether these were risk additive or risk mitigating? What was their impact on volatility? I think we've seen a little bit more of that data now, but where do you fall on that? You think zero days are not the risk additive? I mean we used to jokingly refer to them as gamma bombs maybe because it sounded good. Made for great radio. But you think we moved past that now? You think they have a space in the industry?
I do. Yeah, I really do. And again, I love to be proven wrong, especially when it's customers that aren't being harmed as materially as we thought they were going to be. So, I think yeah, I think we'll continue an expansion at a good pace and just keep monitoring.
Speaking of that expansion, you guys just had your earnings recently and there's a lot of talk post earnings from the analysts and things about the options lens in particular. A lot of people were interested in that. Obviously, your revenue grew year over year, but there's a lot of talk about your guys' take rates and what your actual margin was on the options side kind of decreasing year over year. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that and what do you attribute that to?
It's exactly what we just talked about. The take rates are very different for individual names than they are for broad-based ETFs. So, we try to guide our analysts as much as we can, but they have a lot of companies that they cover.
