Wall Street’s speed race is getting bigger as options trading explodes

The “speed tax” on Wall Street is getting larger because the market is generating vastly more trades for high-frequency firms to arbitrage.

U.S. listed options averaged 72.8 million contracts a day in the second quarter of 2026, up more than 19% from a year earlier. ETF options were up 27%.

0DTE options are growing even faster. Their volume was up 46.2% year to date, reaching more than 20 million contracts a day. SPX 0DTE volume has nearly tripled since the beginning of 2024.

Cboe expects total U.S. options volume to exceed 18 billion contracts in 2026. A decade ago, annual volume was roughly 4 billion.

The retail side is growing with it.

Citadel Securities said retail customers traded about $6.8 billion of options premium per day in June, 65% above the 2025 average. Nearly half of its retail options volume was 0DTE, compared with 30% in 2025 and 13% in 2021.

The amount of information moving through the market has exploded too. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said options message traffic increased from about 9 billion messages per day in 2017 to 247 billion in 2025.

That creates more opportunities for firms that can update prices, hedge positions and react to changes faster than competitors.

The profit on one trade can be tiny.

The scale is not.

And this is not simply one HFT firm taking money from retail traders. Market makers such as Citadel Securities, Jane Street and Susquehanna compete aggressively for the same order flow.

The Reddit commenter is right about one thing: the economics change when traders stop making occasional stock trades and increasingly trade ETFs, options and 0DTE contracts.

A microscopic pricing advantage repeated across billions of contracts becomes a very large business.

The faster computer isn’t necessarily taking a huge amount from one retail trade.

It is getting another opportunity to capture a tiny difference thousands or millions of times.