ANALYSIS: Miami International outlines plans in US futures and options
18th August, 2025|Luke Jeffs
Miami International Holdings plans to leverage the $345m (£254m) raised by its initial public offering last week to expand aggressively its nascent futures business and increase its already broad coverage of the US options market, partly to tap the growing retail opportunity.
Speaking after the US exchange group listed shares in New York on Thursday, Thomas Gallagher, chairman and chief executive officer of Miami International Holdings, said: “The thing I’m trying to do with this capital is leverage the technology, the people and the market relationships I’ve developed over the last 12 years and move those customer relationships from options to futures.”
Miami International Holdings (MIH) listed on Thursday 15 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange at $23 a share, $2 above the top of its expected price range. That raised $345m for the firm, valuing the group at just over $1.8bn.
The IPO highlighted a busy period for the US exchange group which completed last month the migration of MIAX Futures from technology hosted by CME Group to the Miami International’s proprietary technology.
MIAX Futures was launched in October last year as the new name of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange acquired by MIH in late 2020.
Gallagher said: “We bought the Minneapolis Grain Exchange and moved off of the Globex platform in July so the Hard Red Spring Wheat futures are now trading on a Miami matching engine and this presents the opportunity to open up our exchange to financial futures, event-based futures, all kinds of products that I couldn’t do when I was licensing a platform from the CME.”
Central to this effort is the index licensing agreement signed in September last year between MIH and Bloomberg which will see the partners develop a suite of index futures and options based on Bloomberg indices.
“I’ve built the factory and now I hope that, with Bloomberg, we can roll out new products over the next 24-36 months,” said Gallagher.
And that is only one of the plans being worked on by the exchange group and the index giant. “Once we roll-out the first products, we are then going to create a volatility product around the V500 and V100 futures,” said Gallagher. “There are 5,000-6,000 equity indices that Bloomberg has and I want to leverage the relationship with them to go into other financial futures products.”
While developing futures based on Bloomberg indices is the big new opportunity for MIH, there is more to do in the group’s traditional market of US options where the four MIAX exchanges have a combined market share of about 17%, according to the firm.
This makes MIH the fourth largest US options exchange behind Nasdaq, Cboe Global Markets and (narrowly) New York Stock Exchange.
The key MIH development on the options side is the planned launch in September of its first options trading floor in Miami, part of MIAX Sapphire, the options venue that opened in August last year.
Gallagher said: “Until August last year, I only had 85% of the addressable market because I didn’t have the taker-maker model which was launched with the MIAX Sapphire exchange. I asked my head of business strategy how much market share I should expect and he said three-quarters of a point whereas we actually got two points of national volume with Sapphire by the end of 2024 and that’s now at three points and we haven’t even opened the floor yet."
The chairman and chief executive added: “If there’s ten points of market share, it’s not out of the question that in the next year or two to get two additional points of market share from the floor. With new products coming to the market, there are other opportunities.”
Gallagher said that, despite other exchanges having had a head start over Miami International in complex order functionality, MIAX exchanges are now number two in this specialist market.
And further down the line, the MIH chief sees an opportunity in aligning the group’s various futures and options products.
“One of the things I’m looking to do when we launch the second phase of our new platform is to deliver robust electronic options on all of our futures products including wheat. I think we can do a lot more volume in electronic wheat futures and other electronic futures. That’s going to take us a year or two to roll out that functionality.”
The US options market is set in 2025 to record its latest consecutive record year, driven largely by demand from retail traders and investors.
And Gallagher is confident of his firm’s ability to continue to compete in this growing space.
“My market participants in options have a fantastic relationship with the retail customers through firms like Robinhood, WeBull and Ninja. These consolidators want to trade with retail futures flow and because of my technology a clean whiteboard, I can come up with some really creative pricing strategies.”
