Princeton, NJ and Minneapolis, MN — December 15, 2020 — Miami International Securities Exchange, LLC (MIAX®) and the Minneapolis Grain Exchange (MGEX) today announce that a successful first day of futures trading on the SPIKES® Volatility Index (SPIKES) took place yesterday on December 14.
“SPIKES Futures are a significant step forward for the volatility marketplace, adding necessary competition, choice and innovation,” said Thomas P. Gallagher, Chairman and CEO of MIAX. “With SPIKES Futures, investors have access to an advanced, competitively priced volatility trading product that further rounds out the SPIKES Volatility Products portfolio. We are excited that SPIKES Futures liquidity providers successfully began actively quoting yesterday, providing a tight market for SPIKES Futures right out of the gate.”
Available on MGEX via the CME Globex® platform, SPIKES Futures (Ticker: SPK) offers a trading experience consistent with industry best practice tick size, notional value and contract specifications. SPIKES Futures introduces a more innovative, efficient, accurate and cost-effective choice to the current volatility trading market.
“SPIKES Futures is a step toward our goal of growing and diversifying our exchange and bringing much-needed transparency and competition to the volatility sector,” said Mark G. Bagan, President and CEO of MGEX. “This is an exciting moment for MGEX and uniquely positions us to offer many new proprietary products to the derivatives trading community.”
Designed by financial indexing firm T3 Index, SPIKES is a measure of the expected 30-day volatility in the SPDR® S&P 500® ETF (SPY), the most actively traded ETF in the world. Calculated and disseminated every 100 milliseconds, SPIKES offers index stability and accuracy as a result of its proprietary price dragging technology and other features that reduce erratic index values.
“In an increasingly volatile and complex market, SPIKES Futures addresses vital trading needs, including a hedging component, specialized opportunities, reliability and speed. Quite simply, everything that volatility trading firms have long sought,” said Simon Ho, CEO of T3 Index. “SPIKES Futures delivers all of this with ultra-low fees.”
SPIKES Futures contract specifications, trading rules, pricing and interface specifications are available on the MGEX website at www.mgex.com. Additional information regarding SPIKES Futures can be found at MIAXoptions.com/spikes/futures.
Since December 4, 2020, MGEX is a wholly owned subsidiary of MIAX’s parent holding company, Miami International Holdings.
For further information regarding MIAX and SPIKES, please visit https://www.miaxoptions.com/spikes/futures or contact MIAX Trading Operations at TradingOperations@MIAXOptions.com.
