He is selling the dream in Europe: ‘It’s 10% in 17 Minutes’: Option-Trading Show Taps Into Retail Fever Day traders are packing theaters to learn complex trading strategies that were once reserved for Wall Street pros By Justina Lee August 1, 2025 at 5:01 AM GMT+1 On one of London’s hottest nights this year, about 350 people cram into a dark theater with no air conditioning to watch 68-year-old Tom Sosnoff trade options live. Wearing his signature gray wool beret over shoulder-length hair, the co-founder of tastytrade — the derivatives brokerage that sells complex strategies to the masses through entertaining tutorials and live shows — kicks things off by selling two S&P 500 futures options. Within 17 minutes, he closes the positions for a modest gain to a round of applause. “It’s 10% in 17 minutes,” Sosnoff says. “This is what we actually do day-in and day-out.” It’s Friday evening in Hackney and triple-witching day on Wall Street, when stock-index futures, options and single-stock contracts all expire at once. For Sosnoff, a former open-outcry trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the setting is part-performance art, part-proof of concept. It’s his way of showing how understanding options — from risk premiums to time decay — might enrich the retail crowd too, not just Wall Street professionals. Sosnoff spent two decades in the sweaty trading pits of Cboe. He later founded thinkorswim, a retail trading platform now owned by Charles Schwab, before launching tastytrade. After selling the latter to IG Group for $1 billion in 2021, he mainly spends his days hosting a daily show and demonstrating his beloved derivatives strategies live around the world as CEO of tastylive, the entertainment network. “We just want to get you super excited about active trading,” Sosnoff tells the crowd. “For us it’s always been small trades off the law of large numbers, probabilistic outcomes – that’s the best we can do.” He started the firm as a financial entertainment company – Howard Stern but trading, as he describes it. Over 90 minutes at the London event, Sosnoff runs through 37 trades — iron condors, calendar spreads, strangles, even something called a Batman — across stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities. His longtime co-host, Tony Battista, works a laptop projected onto a massive screen. The only other people on stage are reps from CME and Cboe. “They pay for everything,” Sosnoff quips, a claim supported by the glut of branded tote bags, pens and Skittles. For the Chicago exchanges, underwriting events like this — which are free for attendees — is barely a rounding error. The logic is simple: more trades, more volume, more fees. Retail speculation has helped drive US options volumes to a record high this year, data from big xyt and Bloomberg Intelligence show. Brokerages catering to individual investors now earn twice as much routing options trades as they do from equities. Tastytrade is still small. By one measure, it ranks eighth among US retail options brokerages, far behind names like Robinhood or Schwab. Yet few platforms sell complexity — and the sense of mastery it promises — the way Sosnoff does. That’s even as most research-backed financial advice urges buy-and-hold simplicity, a strategy that’s proven remarkably effective, with the S&P 500 tripling over the past decade. Tastytrade thrives on a different proposition: that markets are a lucrative, if unforgiving, puzzle that retail investors can learn to solve. Multi-leg trades – bundled option orders executed together — are gaining ground with this crowd. Robinhood and E*Trade have recently rolled out their own advanced tools, chasing the type of user Sosnoff has long courted. Tastytrade charges about $1 to open an options contract. It also makes money from routing trades to market makers like Citadel Securities and IMC, to the tune of $52 million last year. The more trades users execute, and the longer they stay, the more profitable the business becomes. Options Trading Boom Retail speculation has helped drive activity to new heights Source: Cboe from 2018 through 2022; big xyt starting from 2023; data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence Volatility hedge fund manager Benn Eifert sees the model as engineered to maximize long-term commissions. “If you tell clients to do Roaring Kitty-type stuff, what’s going to happen is they’re going to go out in a blaze of glory,” he said, referring to the meme-stock influencer’s big directional bets. “You tell them to sell short-dated vol over and over again, and you have a zero-expected-return thing, where most of the time you make a little bit of money and then give it all back.” Sosnoff sees it differently. To him, that model means his users get to win small but often. He says retail traders like options because they’re an efficient use of capital and encourage probabilistic thinking. A recent tastylive article even attacks passive investing as “anti-intellectual,” drawing fire from industry voices. “We want people to learn how to win,” Sosnoff says in an interview before the London event. “You can make a million more decisions here, and so your brain starts to work faster.” In other words, the esoteric is part of the draw for this London crowd. They skew older and mostly male. A retired accountant now speculating with his sons. A McKinsey alum from Munich running his own algorithmic strategies. A tech banker who had attended a previous tastytrade event with her trading group. Some are not users — but all watch the videos. As hors d’oeuvres circulate and beer cans clink, conversations move seamlessly from options ‘Greeks’ to geopolitical wild cards. On stage, Sosnoff pulls up Tesla. The “IV rank” — a tastytrade favorite comparing current volatility to its historical range — is at 26. “It’s a mid trade,” he says, directing Battista to put on a short iron condor, a four-part bet on a stock staying in a tight price range. Inside the tastytrade worldview, metrics like these carry more weight than breaking news. “That kind of information is way more important than watching CNBC or Bloomberg or CNN or whatever it is that you’re watching trying to be first to the news,” Sosnoff says. Sosnoff trades live.Photographer: Davide Brenna/tastytrade After the show, some bolt for the balcony for some air and a smoke. Paul Osborne stands alone with a backpack, having flown in from the Netherlands for the event. Most of it goes over his head, he admits, but he’s thrilled to ask Battista a question about managing his short-strangle trades. Osborne, 37, left New Zealand for Nijmegen, a small Dutch city near the German border, to be with his wife. Without fluent Dutch, jobs were hard to come by. Friendships, even harder. He now works at a logistics warehouse, but dreams of making money trading a few hours a week. “My motivation some years ago was to try and find a stream of income that I had control over,” he says. “Something that I can do anywhere in the world.” Buy-and-hold feels too slow. Last year, his portfolio gained about 30%. Then he gave it all back as volatility spiked following President Donald Trump’s tariff announcements on so-called Liberation Day. “When they talk about the selling side of things and then a statistical way of trading, that for me really resonated,” Osborne says. “It’s just a matter of keeping to the mechanics and over time the statistics will work out in your favor.” Even professionals have blown up this way. Selling options is often described as “picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.” Like insurance companies, sellers profit from premiums when trades expire worthless, but occasional market shocks can wipe out years of small wins. The founder of tastytrade sells complexity to the masses through entertaining tutorials and live shows.Photographer: Davide Brenna/tastytrade By around 9 p.m., the event winds down. The US trading day is nearly over. Sosnoff is headed to Milan next, to do it again in a nightclub. A translator will be on hand, but the basic message won’t change. “We specifically use lots of trader terms and we won’t explain them,” he says. “People hate it when you dumb stuff down.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat...to-retail-investor-fever?srnd=homepage-europe
Tom says Tasty is the reason the PDT rule will be gone in late 2025. He’s fun to listen to. What are your thoughts on Tom and Friends?
I saw Tom rolling a 20% drawdown to the next expiration on one of his podcasts. He is not always right, and he doesn't make 10% every morning.
There are a few embedded contradictions, in what you wrote. I know you have already mentioned *in the past*, that you are a profitable, professional and automated options trader yourself. /I am a small retail trader/ 1. But you mentioned a drawdown of 20% and roll of options. Which indicate one trade. As Tom s slogan is * Trade small and offten* , But what do you mean ! On dep captial/ Or whatever! 2. Then in your secound sentence you indicate a day gain of 10% of account. Because if not, it does not mean anything. Because Tom *trade small and often. *Several times a day* Anyway, I do not know if Tom is a good or bad trader. But of course he do not compoud 10% daily. Put it into a compound calculator!
Sure, he made bank by starting and selling that trading biz. But does he actually make money from option trading? From what I've seen from "Tasty Trade" it's mostly just run of the mill strategies with no actual edge.