Options Trading Desk
IMC as a partner
Looking for better execution?
IMC was among the early pioneers of options market making, and among the first to recognise the role of technology in making markets more efficient. Today pricing and trading volatility remains at the core of IMC’s business. IMC is a top 3 market maker in the listed options space globally, and has long-standing relationships with all best-regulated trading venues.
Our Options Direct Counterparty (DCP) Trading desk was set up in 2018, leveraging our presence in screen and Inter Dealer Broker (IDB) market making, and allowing counterparties to request prices directly and trade listed options and futures with IMC off-screen.
Key highlights
- IMC's focus is the listed derivatives market; we trade on and off-screen but always on exchange.
- IMC's DCP desk makes prices for asset managers, hedge funds, pension funds and banks to trade directly with us.
- All of our prices are commission-free.
- IMC provides prices on all major RFQ platforms: BBG RFQE, Tradeweb, RFQHUB and Eurex Enlight.
- Our setup enables us to provide good pricing where others may struggle, for example Weekly and Month End Options, VSTOXX futures + options, and US and Asian Index options during the European session.
Options Sales Desk FAQ
With best execution critical, it’s essential to have a diversified liquidity provider list which includes a large market maker. There are several reasons for this: as banks continue to reduce their risk appetite, market makers are now the primary source of liquidity in most listed screen markets worldwide. What’s more, market makers like IMC have the technology to price and trade in all conditions, including periods of greater volatility, so can always provide tight prices. Finally, for new products which may be less straightforward to price, market makers, as specialists, are much more comfortable with their pricing so can quote tighter spreads.
At IMC all of our effort goes in to pricing. We are an efficient and focused operation, our product is simple: the tightest spread possible for listed derivatives. We don’t charge commissions and we don’t employ large sales teams providing trade ideas and research.
Because we interact with such a high proportion of the total market volume on screen we have valuable real-time visibility of screen market flows. We also work closely with exchanges on new exchange developments related to market structure and product launches, and share our opinion on this with interested counterparties once officially launched.
Our internal traders make a price and take the other side of the trade on to our own book. We can hold this risk and then gradually work out of it through our on-screen trading.
We have a system which trades a huge amount of total on-screen volume. That means we’re efficient at taking on and dispersing risk into the market with low impact.
We quote all major index options in Europe (SX5E, DAX, SMI, SX7E, SXXP, VSTOXX, UKX, AEX, CAC, MIB). During the European session we also quote global index options: NKY, IBOV and the CME E-minis (ES, NQ, RTY)
Our counterparties request prices from us through Bloomberg chat (we have permanent IB rooms with all of our counterparties) and RFQ platforms (Tradeweb, RFQHUB, BBG RFQE, Eurex Enlight).
You can find the Terms and Conditions for trading here
For an initial chat you can reach out to our options sales team via Bloomberg Chat, email or phone.
Contact us
Start trading with IMC. Reach out to our Options sales team and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.
