Cboe Global Markets, Inc. CBOE

The business

Cboe operates five reporting segments, but Options is the engine: $467.6M of Q1 2026 net revenue against $669.9M of company net revenue, roughly 70%, and up 33% year over year. The rest splits across North American Equities (the BZX, BYX, EDGA and EDGX venues plus Cboe Canada), Europe and Asia Pacific, Futures, and the Data Vantage market-data business, which carries the highest margin in the company. The source of the franchise is a license: SPX index options are exclusive to Cboe under agreement with S&P, and the VIX complex is the only volatility benchmark built on top of SPX. That exclusivity is what a moat audit would interrogate; this page only needs to note that it exists and that it concentrates the economics into one segment.

What the income statement understates is a change in how customers use the product. Cboe listed daily-expiring SPX contracts in 2022, and same-day contracts, known as zero-days-to-expiration or 0DTE, have grown to roughly half of SPX volume. A short-dated contract turns over far more often on the same notional exposure, and Cboe collects a fee on each roll, so the mix lifts revenue per unit of open interest without requiring any new customer. The last two quarters pushed that further: Q2 2026 set a record quarterly average daily volume of 21.9 million options contracts, with multi-list options up 40.5% and index options up 36.8% year over year, and a single-day record of 33.4 million contracts on June 5 (Cboe monthly volume release, July 2026). The company also guided Q2 revenue per contract to $0.064 for multi-list options and $0.953 for index options, which is the number that converts those volumes into dollars.