For more than a decade I had been going to the Futures Industry Association conference in Boca Raton and to its Futures and Options Expo in Chicago. As part of each conference the FIA would always include a panel of options exchange leaders. These panels would include the usual griping regarding Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) regulatory structure, which was much more hands on than what the exchanges in the futures world experienced with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Every year at each event the panel would conclude with the moderator asking the exchange leaders for a prediction on what the market would look like in the future and there was always a consensus, which was that there would be consolidation in the option exchange space. Five options exchange were definitely too much, then six option exchanges were too much.
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