New wholesaler has assembled a team of market-makers to compete withCitadel, IMC/Dash and Jane Street
Brian Donnelly almost gave up on competing for US retail options order flow a little over a year ago. Volant Trading, the global market-making firm Donnelly founded in 2006, struggled for three years to establish itself as a wholesaler to WeBull. Retail brokers such as Robinhood and WeBull require wholesalers to handle all types of options – from single names to indexes and zero-day contracts. That paradigm benefits giant market-makers like Citadel Securities, Jane Street and IMC Trading. Specialists get shut out, limiting competition for retail order flow.
Volant purchased order flow from WeBull and executed the trades where it had an edge. In 2023, Donnelly struck a deal with Akuna Capital to make markets in 10 equity indexes. The remaining order flow was sold to other market-makers at a slight premium.
It wasn’t enough. Volant’s share of non-directed options flows from WeBull stood at 7.74% in January 2025. Donnelly was thinking of throwing in the towel to focus on Volant’s successful Asian market-making business when one of his backers – Belvedere Trading – suggested spinning off the US wholesale operation as a separate entity. Belvedere’s venture capital arm invested in the new business, called Optimal Market Technologies, and the trading unit joined as a market-maker. Now, Donnelly has his sights on challenging the options giants. “Brokers generally want their wholesalers to process flow in every name. Not all market-makers can accommodate that. There are a whole bunch of market-makers that are left out of the wholesaling business because they can’t process every name,” says Donnelly. “So, we put a group together that covered different sections of names, with the expectation that we’ll get a team together that can cover them all, in competition with each other.”