Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Schaefer's market mashup.

It's been a while, friends. Over a month I took the entire

April off from the podcast world to get some much-needed r&R, but I am back, I rejuvenated, and I'm thrilled for this week's episode.

It's a topic that has been buzzing, I feel like in the investing world for a long time so I'm thrilled to have

some experts here unpack it all for you all please welcome Ariane Adams head of

derivatives and global client services at Cebo.

Ariane, how's it going?

Great, Patrick, it's great to be with you today.

And I also have Dave Harib, portfolio manager at Nor cap investment management and fellow Connecticut person that I just found out before the episode.

David Haller.

I am wonderful. Thank you for having me on. I'm looking forward to it. Great. So before we jump into this, you know, we're going to talk about weekly options and I pulled some stats from Cebo's website I think that were just

released in the last week. April volume was at 26.9 million weekly options volume, which is a record high.

That comes out to an average daily volume of 1.3 mil.

So this is a topic on the forefront of a lot of people's minds.

Hopefully it articulates a lot of things

that retail traders are looking to find,

you know, looking to learn more about.

I even saw Forbes put out an article they called weekly options trading the scalpel of the

investing world which I love that analogy.

Approximately 40% of total US.S. options volume last year were in short dated contracts.

That's double the level traded in 2017, which was five years ago. And so we're talking about specifically options expiring within five days or less of a trade date.

So, Ariane, I'll let you go here first and then Dave can take it. From your perspective, what's been driving this insane short term, this insane growth in short term options trading?

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