Options Price Reporting Authority


The Options Price Reporting Authority oversees the Securities Information Processor that provides last sale information and current options quotations from a committee of [|participant exchanges]. In turn, this committee is designated as the Options Price Reporting Authority.
OPRA is a national market system plan that governs the process by which options market data are collected from participant exchanges, consolidated, and disseminated.

Participant exchanges

Current OPRA participants include:
The Securities Industry Automation Corporation administers the Securities Information Processor for OPRA. The SIP gathers the last sale and quote information from each of the participant exchanges. SIAC then consolidates and disseminates that data to approved vendors.

Available data

The OPRA data feed provides:
SIAC is responsible for the OPRA systems and networks. CBOE serves as the OPRA administrator.

Messages per second

A significant gauge of the level of options market data is messages per second, which is the number of messages reported to OPRA by the options exchanges during any given second of a trading day.
Data volume has increased dramatically since the early 1990s, as illustrated in the following table.
DatePeak MPS
1992100
1995500
19981,500
July 20004,000
September 200583,339
July 2007573,000
January 2008701,000
July 2008907,000
25 March 2015 11:3110,244,894
20th Nov 2015 11:0022,462,900

Commentators suggest that there are three underlying causes of the increase:
  1. Penny Pricing: In early February 2007, the options industry started switching its minimum price increment from $0.05 to $0.01. Because options prices are automatically updated as soon as the underlying stock price changes, the potential existed to update at five times as many price points.
  2. Dollar Strikes: The standard stock option strike prices are in increments of $2.50 at and below $25, and in $5.00 increments for strikes above $25. A Dollar Strike Program would potentially increase the number of available options contracts by five times.
  3. Regulation NMS
The OPRA MPS data rates are more than 60 times those seen in the equities market, and options data represents well over 75% of all market data.