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Options Industry Sets New Daily Volume Record With 36,132,133 Contracts Traded on Thursday, August 4, 2011

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.

About OCC
OCC is the world's largest equity derivatives clearing organization. Founded in 1973, OCC operates under the jurisdiction of both the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as a Registered Clearing Agency and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as a Derivatives Clearing Organization. OCC now provides central counterparty (CCP) clearing and settlement services to 15 exchanges and trading platforms for options, financial and commodity futures, security futures and securities lending transactions. In 1993, OCC became the first clearinghouse to receive a 'AAA' credit rating from Standard & Poor's Corporation, and has continued to receive that high rating every year as a result of its risk management standards. More information about OCC is available at www.theocc.com.