Chief Information Officer
Chicago Board Options Exchange
[PNR]
The options markets are veritable transaction data factories, and the Chicago Board Options Exchange, home to Standard & Poor’s 500 index options, the volatility index VIX and much more, picked up the pace last year by tripling its quote speed and quadrupling that of orders. “Our trading platform has processed peak rates approaching 600,000 messages per second, adding capacity to accommodate escalating traffic even during extreme conditions,” says executive vice president and CIO Gerald O’Connell. The 59-year-old has been the indispensable “man behind the systems” for more than 25 years with the company, says chairman and CEO William Brodsky. CBOE’s technology, underlying the transition from its open-outcry roots to high-speed electronic trading, was strictly built for purpose. “Most started in the stock world,” O’Connell says of rival options markets. “We’re the reverse. While our platform transacts multiple products, we’ve been the lowest-latency market in options.” O’Connell notes that “as open outcry has diminished, the technology division has expanded,” to the point that it is CBOE’s biggest department, surpassing trading operations. Its imprint is especially evident in the CBOEdirect platform that supports all trading in options, futures and stocks, including the OneChicago single-stock futures exchange and the all-electronic C2 Options Exchange that opened in October. In February the company enhanced its market data offerings with CBOE Streaming Markets.
