Quant Finance Jobs in Chicago and the Options Trading Cluster

Chicago's options market makers cluster around the CME and CBOE, and nearly all of them test the same arithmetic and probability skills at interview.

Chicago is the center of options and futures market making in the United States, built around the trading floors and electronic markets of the CME and the CBOE, and a graduate targeting the city will interview almost exclusively with firms whose business is providing liquidity in listed derivatives. Optiver, DRW Trading, and Jump Trading all run their US headquarters from Chicago, and the density of similar firms within a few blocks of each other is unmatched anywhere else in the country.

Optiver, IMC Trading, Akuna Capital, Old Mission Capital, Belvedere Trading, Chicago Trading Company, Group One Trading, and Wolverine Trading all run their principal US options trading operations from Chicago, quoting continuous two-sided markets across equity, index, and futures options and managing the resulting risk in real time. Susquehanna, headquartered outside Philadelphia, runs one of its largest trading floors from a Chicago office as well, and the firm recruits heavily from the city's universities for its options desks.

These firms interview almost identically at the first round: a timed mental arithmetic test covering percentages, fractions, and quick multiplication, followed by rounds on options pricing intuition, probability, and market-making games where a candidate quotes a market on an unknown quantity and is scored on the resulting profit and loss. A candidate who has not drilled arithmetic under a clock will struggle to clear the first round regardless of how strong their underlying mathematics is, and practice drills built for exactly this kind of test are worth running daily in the weeks before an interview.

Jump Trading and DRW Trading both run large quantitative research and technology organizations alongside their trading desks, and DRW in particular has expanded well beyond its original futures market-making business into venture investing and cryptocurrency market making, which broadens the kind of technical roles available beyond pure trading. Geneva Trading, Teza Technologies, Radix Trading, and Peak6 round out the cluster of mid-sized firms headquartered in or around Chicago, each running systematic strategies across futures, options, or equities with smaller headcounts than the largest names.

Citadel Securities maintains a substantial Chicago presence tracing back to the firm's roots in the city, even as its corporate headquarters has moved to Miami, and the Chicago office remains central to its options and equities market-making business.