Happy New Year! It was a busy 2013, filled with a number of great options-related stories. Here at The Options Insider, we took a look through the many ones that we posted and found the following five to be the top five stories of the year.
Twitter IPO: After the problems incurred by Facebook for its IPO, marketwatchers wondered if this could happen a second time for this social media giant. Fortunately its IPO was smooth sailing as it debuted on NYSE Euronext on Nov. 7; on Nov. 15 its?options started trading. It was a good ride for the stock, especially in December, but lately it’s turned south.
Twitter’s IPO price was $26; it opened at $45.10 before closing at $44.90–a 73 percent jump–on its first day. The stock reached a high of $74.73 and on Dec. 31, it closed at $63.65.
What will 2014 bring?
The VIX eight-day streak: On an given day, the VIX is interesting to watch. This year, it had a nice eight-day streak of gains. This took place at the end of November through Dec. 6. The VIX peaked at 15.08 before snapping at 13.79.
During its streak,?the VIX rose 23 percent, tying an April 10, 2012 record. ?
On Dec. 31, it closed the year at 14.12.
ICE-NYSE Euronext Merger: It was the end of an era for NYSE Euronext as it was acquired by the IntercontinentalExchange (ICE). The transaction closed in November and now this combined exchange will offer a wealth of asset classes: interest rates, equities and equity derivatives, credit derivatives, bonds, foreign exchange, energy, metals and agricultural commodities.
Is bigger always better? We’ll have to see.
Changes in leadership: The options industry said goodbye to two long-term leaders in the options industry: CBOE’s Bill Brodsky and OCC’s Wayne Luthringshausen. Both were the face of their companies for many years but the future looks bright as they’re in good hands with a new generation of leadership.?
Exchange glitches and outages: Unfortunately there wasn’t just one story this year for exchanges suffering from glitches. This occurred on the CBOE in April, an August Nasdaq outage and in September,?OPRA?incurred problems disseminating data.?
Oh yeah, there was also that little options trading error at Goldman Sachs in August.
A possible silver lining from these occurrences? The Securities and Exchange Commission said enough is enough and brought the exchanges leaders together in September for a discussion on how to fix the problems.
Working collaboratively, the exchange SROs responded to the agency’s request to?outline a to-do list in November?that covered issues such as?disaster recovery, market resiliency, infrastructure issues and erroneous options trades.
Will we see the end of glitches in 2014?