By Keith Petersen, head of market data and access services, North America, Cboe Global Markets
The retail brokerage firms growing fastest today are not winning on lower commissions or by focusing solely on driving volume in equities and ETFs. They are the ones quietly rebuilding the foundation underneath those apps. This includes the data, derivatives access, and index infrastructure that allows them to bring new products to market and scale efficiently as retail behavior shifts.
The evolution of retail trading has created a need to rethink the infrastructure that powers retail brokerages. Here are three structural shifts that are reshaping how the next decade of retail trading will be built — and who will build it.
The concentration of retail flow
Retail trading activity is far more concentrated than aggregate volumes suggest. The pattern repeats across asset classes: A small number of highly liquid names drive a meaningful share of retail activity at any given moment.
That concentration changes what brokers need from their market data infrastructure. For decades, brokers paid for breadth, ensuring comprehensive coverage of every listed security, regardless of where their clients actually traded. That model made sense when retail flow was fragmented, but it doesn’t fit today’s landscape. Now, retail activity is highly concentrated in a small number of stocks and execution quality is determined by a handful of highly competitive venues.
The brokers reassessing this are not chasing cheaper data. They are asking themselves whether the data they’re sourcing reflects where their clients actually trade, and if it’s structured to support the products they want to offer next.
Prioritization and adoption of options
Equities remain the entry point for most retail investors, but derivatives are becoming an increasingly important tool as retail investors embrace more sophisticated strategies. Once primarily seen as an institutional tool, retail investors have played an important role in the growth of options. Today, it’s estimated that retail brokerages make up more than 50% of the market. More retail brokerages are prioritizing education options and looking to add new tools and products to meet this growing demand.
The composition of flow has shifted in ways that matter even more than the totals. Roughly 60% of S&P 500 Index (SPX) options volume is now zero-days-to-expiration (0DTE) contracts, up from 20% in 2021. Since the introduction of Monday and Wednesday expirations for a small group of single-stock options classes in January of 2026, average daily volume has grown to nearly 3 million per day. This shift in activity and growth in adoption emphasizes that listed options are no longer a power-user feature bolted onto an equity platform —they’re a core feature of how retail investors now hedge and express market views on a daily basis.
This shift has consequences for retail brokerages beyond product strategy. Investors now need access to accurate, timely data on the underlying assets, particularly the index products that anchor the most actively traded contracts. Brokers need surveillance, risk tooling, and benchmarks that institutional desks have relied on for years, but that retail platforms may not have needed previously.
Brokers who treat options as a separate product, rather than part of the retail ecosystem, are discovering that integration costs can compound quickly. Those who treat it as a single capability are scaling faster and at lower marginal cost.
Consolidating infrastructure into a single framework
The same fragmentation pattern repeats across the rest of the stack. Some brokers have multiple data feeds, disconnected vendor relationships, inconsistent licensing terms across regions, and separate index providers for each product line. These decisions were reasonable at the time, but when compounded, they can create operational drag that slows product launches, complicates regional expansion, and inflates the cost base.
This is where Cboe Data Vantage can help. By consolidating market data, analytics, listed options, FX, and index services across US and European equities into a single framework, Cboe Data Vantage gives brokers a way to align their infrastructure with how their clients actually trade. This also provides brokers with the ability to seamlessly add new products without adding new vendor relationships each time. For firms expanding across asset classes and regions, the value is less about any individual feed and more about removing the friction between them.
What the next decade rewards
The question facing retail brokerages is not just which features to build next, but whether the foundation beneath them can support the next phase of retail growth.
As retail behavior shifts, brokerage firms will need to adapt and rebuild their core infrastructure, not just compete on commissions or equity volume alone. Data, derivatives access, and index capabilities are becoming critical enablers of product innovation and are laying the foundation for scaling in the next phase of retail brokerage.
Learn more about how Cboe Global Markets is helping scale the next phase of retail brokerage.
This sponsored post was supplied by Cboe Global Markets.
