Spot Trading

Founded in 1999 by Rob Merrilees, Spot Trading was one of the first entirely off-floor proprietary trading firms amongst its peers. Spot excelled at leveraging a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, internally developed trading tools, and trader decision making to price the universe of listed equity options. As technological advances transformed capital markets, proprietary trading firms came to look more and more like applied technology firms. As a result, Spot grew from 4 employees at inception to over 150 employees - becoming proficient in the uses of high-performance computing, low latency data feeds and networks, automated trade execution, and the development of AI enhanced algorithmic trading strategies. Spot’s innovative approach to solving the “big data” challenges inherent to the equity options markets enabled the firm to monitor the pricing of over one million individual securities in real time. Spot regularly traded over 100,000 equity option contracts and several million shares of stock per day. Spot was a member of several options and equity exchanges including: CBOE, NYSE/ARCA, NYSE/AMEX, ISE, Gemini, BATS, BOX PHLX, and Direct EDGE. Spot was also a member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) During its time, Spot was recognized amongst its peers for a variety of awards for excellence, including: • NABC National Best and Brightest Companies to Work for 2011 • NABC National Best and Brightest Companies to Work for 2012 • NABC National Best and Brightest Companies to Work for 2013 • NABC National Best and Brightest Companies to Work for 2014 • NABC National Best and Brightest Companies to Work for 2015 • Chicago Tribune’s Top 100 Workplaces in Chicago 2014 • Chicago Tribune’s Top 100 Workplaces in Chicago 2015 Spot Trading was headquartered in Chicago and operated from 1999 until early 2018.