Is Robinhood feeding the frenzy of zero days to expiry options trading?

One thing I’ll be looking for when Robinhood Markets reports earnings after the close won’t show up in any of its fourth-quarter numbers. And that’s any color from management on early uptake of trading in index options, which launched on January 21, on the platform beloved by retail traders.

In particular, I’m interested in the extent to which the availability of these derivatives deepens the boom in trading of S&P 500 options with zero days to expiry. Yes, that’s same-day options punts, rapid theta decay be damned.

(Disclosure: Sherwood Media is an editorially independent subsidiary of Robinhood Markets Inc. I own HOOD stock as part of my compensation.)

S&P 500 options with zero days to expiry (0dte) have seen rapid growth, from an average of 932,744 traded daily in 2022 to upward of 1.5 million in 2024.

Now, correlation is certainly not necessarily causation here (and it’s still very early days), but there’s been an acceleration in the growth of S&P 500 0dte trading since the introduction of index options on the platform. The five-day average of 0dte S&P options traded is up about 0.5% from the first five sessions of the year through Monday. Post launch, volumes are up 2.4% compared to their prior 2025 average.

This includes (and may be distorted by) the record activity in these contracts in the final trading day of January, per Cboe.

On Tuesday, 0dte expiries were nearly 60% of S&P 500 option volumes traded, per Bloomberg data, up from an average of about 51% in the fourth quarter of 2024.