We document a rapid increase in retail trading in options in the United States. Facilitated by payment for order flow (PFOF) from wholesalers executing retail orders, retail trading recently reached over 60% of total market volume. Nearly 90% of PFOF comes from three wholesalers. Exploiting new flags in transaction-level data, we isolate wholesaler trades and build a novel measure of retail options trading. Our measure comoves with equity-based retail activity proxies and drops significantly during U.S. brokerage platform outages and trading restrictions. Retail investors prefer cheaper, weekly options with average bid-ask spread of 12.6%, and lose money on average.

中文翻译：

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期权零售交易与三大批发商的崛起

我们记录了美国期权零售交易的快速增长。在批发商执行零售订单的订单流支付 (PFOF) 的推动下，零售交易量最近达到了市场总量的 60% 以上。近 90% 的 PFOF 来自三个批发商。利用交易级数据中的新标志，我们隔离批发商交易并建立零售期权交易的新颖衡量标准。我们的指标与基于股票的零售活动指标同步，并在美国经纪平台中断和交易限制期间大幅下降。散户投资者更喜欢更便宜的每周期权，平均买卖价差为 12.6%，平均亏损。