Market-structure
Cboe launched pre-market and after-hours trading for around 20 single-stock options on 13 July, following SEC approval of the eligibility filing
The new sessions run 7:30-9:25am and 4:00-4:15pm ET on Cboe's C1 exchange, limited to options meeting six-month volume, market-cap and underlying-liquidity thresholds; the initial list covers the Magnificent Seven plus names like Palantir, Broadcom and AMD, not the broader options market.
Cboe Options Exchange began offering extended trading hours for select multi-listed single-stock options on 13 July, after the SEC approved the rule filing underpinning it. The new windows run Monday to Friday: a pre-market session from 7:30am to 9:25am ET and a post-market session from 4:00pm to 4:15pm ET, bracketing the exchange's ordinary trading day rather than replacing it. This is an options-market change, not an equities one, and it applies only to the specific contracts Cboe has designated eligible, not to single-stock options generally.
Eligibility is set by a six-month lookback across three tests: average daily volume of 150,000 contracts or more, an underlying equity market capitalization of $50 billion or more, and underlying average daily share volume of 10 million or more. That bar is deliberately high, and Cboe expects it to produce around 20 names at launch, concentrated in the Magnificent Seven (Nvidia, Tesla, Apple among them) alongside other heavily traded single names like Palantir, Broadcom and AMD. Anything outside that list keeps trading on the ordinary session only.
The rationale for building this at all sits with the same shift driving Nasdaq's, NYSE's and LSEG's separate moves toward longer or continuous trading hours this year: a growing share of order flow is automated, and automated systems do not stop reacting to news, earnings or overnight developments in Asia just because the US options session has closed. Extending the window for the most liquid, most heavily quantitatively traded names is a narrower, faster version of the same bet LSE 24 is making at much larger scale, that market infrastructure needs to catch up to participants who trade on a 24-hour information cycle rather than a 6.5-hour one.
What is untested is whether the new windows will actually be liquid enough to matter. Fifteen minutes after the close and just under two hours before the open are thin slices of the day even for the most active names, and the eligibility test itself is measured on ordinary-session volume, not on how these contracts trade in the new windows, so there's no guarantee the same ~20 names stay eligible once real extended-hours activity (or the lack of it) starts feeding back into the numbers. Cboe has built the access; whether market-makers and algorithmic desks actually show up to price it tightly in a 15-minute post-market window is a separate question the launch itself doesn't answer.
Read the original: Cboe Global Markets - Cboe launched pre-market and after-hours trading for around 20 single-stock options on 13 July, following SEC approval of the eligibility filing. Commentary is the independent editorial view of Share Trading; the original article is credited to its publisher.