The LSE Directory / Prop firms
Optiver Holding B.V. is a proprietary trading firm and market maker headquartered in Amsterdam. It continuously quotes buy and sell prices for listed derivatives, cash equities, exchange traded funds, bonds and foreign exchange across more than 50 exchanges and trading venues worldwide, trading its own capital rather than money raised from outside investors or managed on behalf of clients. The firm states that it prices more than one million financial instruments and executes over ten million trades a day. Optiver's core specialty is options market making. It is one of the most active on-screen liquidity providers for single stock and equity index derivatives on Eurex, and a leading market maker in Nasdaq-100, Russell 2000 and E-mini S&P 500 options in the United States. Unlike an asset manager, it takes no outside capital and earns its return purely from market making and proprietary positioning, built on quantitative research, low latency trading infrastructure and a graduate recruitment pipeline drawn heavily from mathematics, physics, computer science and engineering programs. Beyond exchange traded derivatives, it also runs a bespoke liquidity and sales trading business that prices directly for banks and brokers. Optiver was founded on 9 April 1986 in Amsterdam by Johann Kaemingk, Ruud Vlek and Chris Oomen as an options market maker on the European Options Exchange, the predecessor of Euronext Amsterdam. It is now led by chief executive Jan Boomaars, a former Goldman Sachs partner of 21 years who joined Optiver in 2015 to run its European business and became CEO in January 2018. For the 2024 financial year, Optiver reported net trading income of 3.494 billion euros, up 26 percent on 2023, net profit of 1.369 billion euros attributable to equity holders, and total equity of 4.905 billion euros, with roughly 2,100 employees worldwide. In April 2012, Optiver Holding and two of its units agreed to a US federal court order paying a 14 million dollar penalty and disgorgement to settle CFTC charges that the firm manipulated NYMEX crude oil, heating oil and gasoline futures prices at least 19 times in March 2007 through a "banging the close" scheme, and made false statements to NYMEX when questioned about it; three of its officers separately accepted bans of two to eight years from trading commodities in the United States. Optiver has kept expanding beyond its market making core. In early 2025 it joined a consortium including XTX Markets to make a strategic investment in A5X, a new Brazilian derivatives exchange targeting a 2026 launch, building on a presence in Brazil's markets that the firm says goes back more than 12 years. In 2025 it also opened a roughly 23,000 square foot Manhattan office to grow its US business alongside its longstanding Chicago base, and by 2026 trade press reporting put its global headcount above 2,200 as it recruited quantitative researchers and trading engineers from banks and hedge funds.
