Lit continuous trading in European equities is declining. This is a trend that needs to be understood and analysed so that we can identify the causes and potential impact on end investors and market quality. Lit continuous order books, where buyers and sellers trade against displayed quotes, are a fundamental part of how prices are formed. Their health matters to everyone who participates in European equity markets.

Despite accounting for just 4% of the EU’s population, the Netherlands has emerged as a critical gateway for European capital markets through decades of investment in market infrastructure, liquidity and participation. Its success provides a blueprint for policymakers seeking to deepen and integrate Europe’s capital markets.

For the past several years, US stock investors have hedged their portfolios largely by looking at their calendars. Fed meetings, CPI prints, elections – whenever an event appeared on the horizon, investors would look to short-dated options to protect against the possibility of volatility.

While Brazil’s securities borrowing and lending framework has its strengths, it still trails global peers. In this paper, we propose steps to modernize the country’s SBL system, without compromising safety.

UK and EU regulators are set to reverse historic ‘unbundling’ rules. But while the rules were imperfect, we believe real strides were made in getting investors to pay attention to trading costs. Now more than ever, traders need to carefully choose the right execution partners and strategy.

More abundant and deeper liquidity in cleared swaps markets is achievable with incremental changes and targeted adjustments to rules governing swaps trading. This paper explores practical policy recommendations to achieve this goal.

The Option Greeks are a collection of variables that measure the sensitivity of option prices to changes in underlying factors. Mathematically, they are derivatives of components of option pricing models. Each factor has a Greek letter assigned to it, hence the name ‘Greeks’.

The Options Basics Explainer introduced the concepts of call and put options, strike price, expiry, and long or short positions in an option contract. This page looks in more detail at option pricing.

What is an ETF? An ETF – or exchange traded fund – is a fund formed by a basket of underlying instruments that can be traded on the exchange. ETFs are often (but not always) tracking an index and following the index methodology, providing investors a low-cost and efficient way to invest in an index without having to buy all the underlying constituents.

What are options? An option is a type of derivative contract that gives the holder the right to buy or sell the underlying asset at a predetermined price – the exercise or strike price – at or before a certain date. Options exist on a wide variety of underlying assets, like single stocks, indices, ETFs, bonds, currencies, commodities. These contracts can serve as tools to protect a portfolio against potential losses or to express an opinion about the direction of the market.

What do long/short positions in put options mean? In the simplest terms, there are four positions an investor can take in options: buying call options (long call), selling/writing call options (short call), buying put options (long put), and selling/writing put options (short put).

Besides buying or selling single options, there are many other possible strategies that involve positions in multiple options simultaneously, as well as combining options with positions in the underlying assets.

We sat down with Pat Cooney, Head of Platform Engineering, to talk about what Platform Engineering means here and where agentic AI fits into the picture. Pat has spent over a decade at Optiver across markets, regions, and roles.

When people talk about developer productivity, they often jump straight to tools: powerful coding agents, faster compilers, smarter automation. These things matter, but they are not the whole story.

In most systems, the database acts as a boundary. You write data into it, and other systems read from it. If you need something more dynamic, like reacting to changes as they happen, you usually introduce something alongside it, whether that is a service layer, a queue, or a stream.

Large language models (LLMs) are getting surprisingly good at learning the basics of trading. Consider that the latest models are able to perform tasks like pricing simple scenarios, reasoning through rules and even outlining basic strategies.

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.

If a UI doesn’t feel instant, it feels broken and users start to question what they’re seeing. A grid lags, values don’t update when expected, or a filter that used to feel instant starts to slow down. In high-demand systems like a trader’s workstation, a single desktop may be running many latency-sensitive applications at once, all competing for CPU, memory, and network bandwidth, so issues can show up quickly.

Optiver, a leading global market maker, announced a strong set of financial results for the year 2025, as the company marked its 40th anniversary.

Optiver is partnering with IIT Bombay to launch the IIT Bombay-Optiver AI Innovation Lab — a dedicated research facility that will support cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research in artificial intelligence.

Based in Washington, D.C., the Psaros Center is a leading academic initiative focused on advancing research, convening policymakers and financial industry leaders, and raising the quality of solutions-oriented discussion that impacts financial markets policy and practice.

Optiver’s new Sydney office at 275 Kent Street, is a purpose-built workplace designed to accelerate innovation, attract top talent, and strengthen the firm’s role as a leading market maker and liquidity provider in the Asia Pacific region.

Ranking among the world's top players for over a decade comes with the pressure to keep winning, and this year proved a challenging start for Anish.

Historical data at a high level of granularity isn’t easy to manage, and we found the datasets offered by vendors lacking.