Why Most Traders Lose and a Few Firms Win

In 2025 the Options Clearing Corporation, the clearing house behind every listed option in the United States, cleared 15,207,163,554 options contracts, 24.4% more than the 12,224,227,606 of 2024 (OCC, 5 January 2026). On the most heavily traded index product, the S&P 500 index options that Cboe lists under the symbol SPX, a record 59% of the year's volume was in contracts that expired on the day they were traded. By July 2026 that share of SPX volume had reached 66.2% (Cboe). Each of those contracts had a buyer and a seller, and every dollar one of them gained the other lost.

On the other side of a large share of that volume stood a handful of trading firms. In April 2026 Reuters reported, from documents and anonymous sources, that Jane Street, the New York partnership that three former Susquehanna traders and an IBM programmer started in 1999–2000, had earned about $39.6 billion of net trading revenue in 2025, a record. Part of the figure reportedly came from revaluing private stakes the firm holds, including one in Anthropic, so it is not all trading profit. Hudson River Trading reportedly earned about $12.3 billion and Citadel Securities about $12.2 billion, up about 25% on 2024. None of the firms confirmed the figures. Jane Street's own reported net trading revenue had been about $10.6 billion in 2023 and about $20.5 billion in 2024 (reported, from debt-offering disclosures). For comparison with something audited, Virtu Financial, the one large US market maker with listed shares, reported record revenue of $3.63 billion for 2025 in its SEC filings.

The clearest measurement of who was on the other side comes not from the United States, where no regulator publishes the profit and loss of retail options traders, but from India. India's National Stock Exchange became the world's largest derivatives exchange by contracts traded on the strength of weekly index options bought and sold by individuals, and the Securities and Exchange Board of India, SEBI, counted the results. Its study of 23 September 2024 found that 93% of the 1.13 crore (11.3 million) individuals who traded equity futures and options in the three financial years to March 2024 lost money, with net losses of about ₹1.81 lakh crore (about ₹1.81 trillion). In FY24 alone individuals lost about ₹75,000 crore and 91.1% of them lost money, while proprietary traders made about ₹33,000 crore and foreign portfolio investors about ₹28,000 crore of gross profit. A follow-up study found about 91% of individuals losing in FY25 and 87.7% in FY26 (SEBI). In its interim order of 3 July 2025 SEBI put Jane Street's India options profit at roughly ₹36,500–36,700 crore for January 2023 to May 2025 (sources differ on the exact figure), barred the group's entities from Indian markets and impounded ₹4,843.57 crore as alleged unlawful gains from manipulating the BANKNIFTY index on options-expiry days. Jane Street deposited the sum in escrow on 14 July, was allowed to trade again on condi