OCC announced that a new daily options trading volume record was set on Monday, August 8, 2011 when 41,535,560 contracts were traded. This is 5.07 percent higher than the previous record of 39,530,495 contracts set on August 5, 2011.
This is the third consecutive daily volume record, the first time that has occurred since the early days of the industry. The total number of contracts for all three days is 117,198,188 contracts.
Equity options trading also set a new record with 37,972,071 contracts, a 6.02 percent increase over the previous record of 35,817,166 contracts traded on August 5, 2011.
At the end of July 2011, year-to-date average daily trading volume was 17.7 million contracts. August average daily trading volume at this point is 31.1 million contracts. A total of 2,193,880 transactions took place on August 8, resulting in $20.3 billion in premium changing hands.