Four market making firms have joined forces to back a firm buying US options order flow from retail brokers, shaking up the lucrative business of providing liquidity to a fast-growing corner of the equity market.
Akuna Capital, Belvedere Trading, Optiver and Virtu Financial Inc. have invested in a new options intermediary, Optimal Market Technologies, according to people familiar with the matter. The four market makers will be leading members of a larger group of liquidity providers who will compete for flow routed from trading apps used by small-scale traders to Optimal.
Citadel Securities is the largest buyer of such flow, according to data from Bloomberg Intelligence, but Dutch market maker IMC Trading has become a significant force in the market over the past three years, claiming second place through an alliance with a broker called Dash Financial.
US retail brokers like Robinhood Markets Inc – which have cut commissions on trades to as low as zero – make the lion’s share of their money by selling customer order flow to wholesalers. It’s a growing business – US options volume has set records each of the past six years, with average daily volumes rising by a quarter in 2025 to 61 million trades. Order flow payments across equities and options reached rose 51% to $1.24 billion in the third quarter of 2025, compared with the third quarter of last year, according to analysis from Bloomberg Intelligence.