Belvedere Trading is a Chicago-based proprietary trading firm that has operated as an options and futures market maker since March 2002, when it began quoting in the SPX pit on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. It now trades electronically, providing continuous two-sided markets in equity index and single stock options, futures, and futures options, using pricing, risk, and execution software the firm builds and maintains itself rather than licensing from a third-party vendor. Belvedere is a broker-dealer registered under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and a member of Cboe Global Markets, FINRA, and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, along with numerous other US options and futures exchanges. Belvedere's specialization is that it owns its entire technology stack rather than buying pricing and risk systems off the shelf, a legacy of starting with options models run on handheld computers on the exchange floor and rebuilding them in house as the firm moved to electronic trading. It makes markets and trades proprietarily across equity indices, single stocks, energies, grains, interest rates, metals, and softs, competing against other Chicago and national proprietary trading firms primarily on the strength of that home-grown technology and its floor-trading heritage, rather than on external capital or a retail-facing brand. The firm was founded in March 2002; company materials and industry trade press, including MarketsWiki and John Lothian News, credit Tom Hutchinson, a former CBOE floor trader, as founder, and Yezdaan Baber has been CEO since 2018. Belvedere has grown to roughly 400 employees across its offices and was named to Built In Chicago's "Best Places to Work" list for multiple years including 2024. In September 2019 the CFTC ordered Belvedere to pay a $1.1 million civil penalty after finding the firm's traders had engaged in spoofing on hundreds of occasions in CME E-mini S&P 500 futures, between June 2014 and February 2015 and again in October and November 2015; the firm received credit for cooperating and resolving the matter early. In April 2025, Belvedere was named lead market maker for Cboe's newly launched S&P 500 Equal Weight Index options, with the firm's head of market structure, Megan Morgan, quoted welcoming the assignment. It has also stood up a Singapore entity, incorporated in 2022, to support Asia-Pacific trading hours and expand into digital asset products, alongside its US offices in Chicago, Boulder, and New York.
