The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) is one of the worlds larget options exchanges. It was formed in 1973 by the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT).
It served as the first formal and standardised place for the trade of stock options in a fair and orderly manner, and on the 26th of April 1973, 911 contracts were traded upon 16 underlying stocks.
Even though the CBOE was the first orderly options exchange, it was not until 1975 when the Black-Scholes method for pricing options and computerized price reporting was introduced that options became more widespread.
However, things have now come a long way in the last 20 years. The CBOE boasts contract volume at an all-time record of 468,249,301 contracts (up 30% over the previous year), and the notional value of this volume was more than $12 trillion!
Technorati Tags: options, options+trading, cboe, exchanges