The Growth of Retail Futures Trading

Global futures volumes have been on the rise for the past few years. This instrument, which is normally the go-to for corporates and professional traders, is fast becoming the darling of retail traders.
Why is a financial instrument, which is mostly used by institutions seeking to hedge risk in their business operations and other market activities, growing in popularity among smaller investors?
Trading activity in futures tends to be cyclical due to the quarterly nature of the business cycle, which leads to increases in activity as corporations routinely hedge their exposure to commodities, currencies, interest rates, and any other securities they may otherwise be exposed to.
But futures are also a speculative instrument, allowing traders to bet on the future rise and fall of underlying assets without having to own them. The relative ease with which these positions can be leveraged is also a key feature explaining the popularity of this instrument.
As we’ll see below, the pandemic was a watershed moment in the trading of futures moving into the mainstream, but those lockdown-inspired hijinks show no signs of abating as this instrument increasingly comes to be adopted by the wider trading public.
A brief history of futures trading
The idea of securing a price now for goods or services to be exchanged in the future is certainly not a new one. It’s human nature to seek to clinch the best deal, and so it always made sense for humans to create speculative agreements to be finalized at some future date.
One of the first documented futures exchanges that bear a resemblance to modern futures trading was the Dojima Rice Exchange in Osaka, Japan, back in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Rice futures were traded on that exchange, rice being such an important commodity at the time that the professional class, including the Samurai, were paid in it. The Dojima Rice Exchange was highly influential in the history of trading, with the now highly popular candlestick price chart also having been invented there.
Almost a century and a half after futures trading debuted in Japan, its modern equivalent began in Chicago. Located at the nexus between midwestern farmers and east coast consumers, Chicago became the epicenter of “forward” contracts, allowing farmers to secure a price for their future produce and distributors to clearly define the costs of their future supplies. The standardization of these forward contracts by quantity, quality, and delivery dates, managed by the local exchange, led to what we now know as futures contracts.
By the end of the 1800s, futures exchanges had spread all over the United States but the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) remained as one of the largest and most influential exchanges in the trading of futures and other derivatives. Today, CME Group is the world’s largest futures exchange.
Futures trading figures
In 2020, the World Federation of Exchanges published its annual analysis of derivatives markets. The report revealed the extent of the surge in derivatives trading volumes that occurred during the early days of the pandemic.
2020 saw a 40.4% increase in derivatives trading as participants rushed to futures markets to hedge against the volatility and manage the risks introduced to global markets by the pandemic. Volumes were over three times greater than in the previous year, and the surge in activity was said to have been comparatively greater than even during the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
The pandemic was also a landmark moment in retail trading. Dubbed the meme stock phenomenon, retail traders flexed their collective muscle and gave Wall Street a bloody nose. Coordinating their activities via online forums such as WallStreetBets, they purchased deep out-of-the-money call options on doomed stocks like GameStop and AMC. The activity forced a short squeeze for institutional players that had been nakedly shorting those stocks and eventually led to the collapse of the hedge fund known as Melvin Capital.
In January 2024, the FIA (Futures Industry Association) announced that global volumes in futures trading had broken records in 2023. 137 billion contracts were traded that year, a 64% increase compared to 2022. This was also the sixth year in a row of record-breaking global futures volumes.
In January 2025, the top 150 global futures contracts were shown to have increased in traded notional value by 16.7% between 2023 and 2024. Precious metals, foreign exchange, interest rates, and equity futures were the top performers for that year.
In February, 2025, both CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange, reported all-time high daily trading volumes on futures and options contracts. ICE traded 100+ million futures and options contracts on February 20, meanwhile, CME Group traded 67+ million futures contracts on February 25.
Recently, CME Group also reported record-breaking activity on micro E-mini futures, which are tailored to smaller investors. Average daily volume (ADV) on these smaller futures contracts (1/10th the size of E-mini futures) saw a 35% increase when compared to last year’s figures.
According to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, US retail futures volumes are on average 50% higher now than they were pre-pandemic. Even though the pandemic was a highpoint in retail trading activity that was artificially boosted by huge swathes of the population stuck at home receiving benefits, it appears that the interest in trading among the retail crowd continues to grow.
Futures-related mergers & acquisitions
In recent years, a slew of M&A activity suggests that financial services firms are preparing for increased futures trading among retail participants. Whether it be brokers acquiring crypto exchanges, crypto exchanges acquiring brokers, or OTC venues attaining Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) licenses, the consolidation taking place speaks to a future in which the separation between instruments and asset classes is being eroded in favor of multi-asset, multi-instrument future.
Back in 2021, IG Group acquired US futures and options brokerage, Tastytrade. The $1 billion deal was the publicly listed UK broker’s largest ever acquisition and was central to its ambitions to expand into the US retail futures and options market.
In the same year, another UK-based public broker (initially specializing in CFD trading) expanded in the US futures market when Plus 500 purchased Cunningham Commodities, a registered US Futures commission merchant.
In 2024, zero-commission trading app Robinhood purchased Marex, a registered FCM. Following this acquisition, Robinhood acquired cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp for $200 million. The US broker plans to begin offering crypto futures products to US customers.
In March of this year, Plus 500 also acquired Mehta Securities, an Indian financial services firm with a foothold in the lucrative Indian futures market.
Also in March, cryptocurrency exchange Kraken announced its purchase of US retail futures trading platform and brokerage, NinjaTrader, for $1.5 billion. The purchase adds an FCM license to the popular crypto exchange’s regulatory credentials and endows it with the ability to offer cryptocurrency futures to US clients.
Why retail futures are heating up
Retail activity during the pandemic, most notably the meme stock phenomenon and the infamy of WallStreetBets, had a big role to play in the popularization of futures and options trading. What were formerly regarded as complex instruments for professional traders garnered a great deal of mainstream interest.
However, the groundwork was already being laid by a retail trading industry that had realized trading held the promise of becoming a mass market activity rather than one limited to a certain contingent of professional retail, or “protail” clients.
The move to zero commissions and the development of trading apps tailored to younger traders was a huge step in this direction and precedes the pandemic. In 2013, Robinhood, a zero-commission trading app tailored to Millennial users, burst onto the scene and forced existing brokers to rethink their pricing models.
By the close of 2019, online brokers such as Fidelity, Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Interactive Brokers, and E*TRADE had all been forced to slash their own commissions to remain competitive.
The above also coincided with a competitive social media milieu in which influencers and YouTubers were all working to attract the views of interested potential traders by offering trading-related educational content covering everything from options strategies to how futures contract expirations work.
This environment led to a deluge of free educational material created for beginners, which significantly lowered the barriers for entry, as well as raising the overall financial literacy of a whole new generation of retail traders.
Add to this a great deal of work behind the scenes in the development of capable trading platforms informed by the preferences of younger users, and you can see how the pandemic was the perfect storm (lockdowns + stimulus checks) that took advantage of tools and services that were already in place.
The bias of younger users towards web-apps and mobile interfaces, rather than the older generation’s desktop platforms, was a phenomenon that was already well-known and had informed a plethora of new trading platforms for futures and options traders.
Then we have the creation of Micro-E-mini futures, which made trading futures on the four major US indices a tenth of the cost of the E-mini futures that preceded them. Micro-E mini futures were launched by CME Group in May of 2019, just in time for the retail landslide that was to come.
Another factor that a lot of generational research is pointing to is the different trading habits of Millennials and Gen Z compared to Gen X and Baby Boomers. The former are well known for their relative risk aversion and their preference for buy and hold strategies. These cohorts are responsible for the explosion in passive investing and the popularity of ETFs, particularly in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC).
Millennials and Gen Z, on the other hand, growing up in the wake of the economic hardships that the GFC and the pandemic visited on their families, appear to have adopted a “nothing to lose” attitude. They are active rather than passive, trading more often than their older counterparts. They trade individual symbols, they also trade riskier assets than their predecessors, such as crypto.
In many ways, these younger generations are the ideal clients for online brokers, which goes some way to explaining the increased availability of futures and options products for the retail market over the past decade or so.
Final thoughts
All indications show that retail’s appetite for a wider variety of assets and instruments continues to grow. Futures and options are the latest financial instruments to gain wider mainstream interest and acceptance.
The industry consolidation we’re seeing, as the biggest players from all sides of the asset landscape make moves to expand their offerings, is also proof of this. In order to remain competitive and to differentiate themselves from one another, these industry participants will have to keep evolving their technologies, including matching engines, market data provision, trading platforms, and trading tools.
If you would like to learn more about Devexperts’ futures and options trading platform, please sign up for a demo at the previous link or reach out to our team.