Chicago Trading Company (CTC) is a proprietary trading firm that makes markets in options and other derivatives, providing pricing and liquidity across major US and European exchanges. Its business originated with floor-based options market making and has since moved to electronic operations, with traders, quants, technologists and operations staff working together on pricing, risk management and trading systems. The firm trades across equities, interest rates and commodities in addition to its core options business, and has historically held market-making roles on CBOE, CME Group (including CBOT and NYMEX), Eurex, ISE, BOX and OneChicago, as well as the now-defunct AMEX. CTC specialises in options market making underpinned by a quantitative research and systematic trading culture, distinguishing it from execution-only brokers or purely directional funds. It has held lead market maker (LMM) status for major CBOE equity index options and specialist roles in products such as NDX and MNX, and has served as a primary market maker in US Treasury options (5, 10 and 30 year) and in S&P 500 E-mini, Russell 2000 and eurodollar options at CME. Alongside its trading business, the firm runs CTC Venture Capital as a separate investing arm, and it was an early institutional participant in crypto market infrastructure, taking an investment stake in the digital-asset derivatives exchange ErisX in 2018 and joining the Pyth Network oracle in 2021 to publish cryptocurrency price data on-chain, with stated plans to extend that to equities. The firm was co-founded by Eric Chern in March 1995; Chern later served as CEO from 2009 to 2019 before moving to the board. Daniel Feuser succeeded him as CEO in 2019 and became board chair when Jonathan Grodnick took over as CEO in January 2023. CTC is headquartered in Chicago at 425 South Financial Place, with additional offices in New York, London and Amsterdam, and lists roughly 786 employees on its LinkedIn company profile as of 2026. Effective January 1, 2026, CTC moved to a co-CEO structure, naming Lauren Rauch, a more than 20-year CTC veteran who most recently served as Chief Operating Officer, and Josh Schubkegel, who joined the firm in 2023 as Chief Technology Officer and led modernisation of its trading platform and low-latency infrastructure, as joint chief executives; Grodnick remained on the board. The transition was announced November 20, 2025 and was framed by the firm as continuing a technology-led modernisation of its trading and research infrastructure.
