OCC announced that a new daily options trading volume record was set on Thursday, August 4, 2011 when 36,132,133 contracts were traded. This is 17.24 percent higher than the previous record of 30,818,984 contracts set on May 6, 2010.
Equity options trading also set a new record with 33,036,121 contracts, a 12.55 percent increase over the previous record of 29,352,698 contracts traded on December 16, 2010.
The record daily volume of 36.1 million contracts was more than double the year-to-date average daily volume going into yesterday of 17.8 million contracts. A total of 1,988,353 transactions took place on August 4, resulting in $12.3 billion in premium changing hands.