Mini Options
Mini options are exchange-listed contracts that cover 10 shares of an underlying security rather than the standard 100 shares, allowing smaller accounts to trade options on high-priced stocks such as Amazon, Google, and Apple without committing full-sized notional exposure.
Standard U.S. equity options control 100 shares per contract, making a single deep-in-the-money option on a stock trading at $3,000 a significant capital commitment. Mini options were introduced in 2013 on the CBOE and other exchanges to address the affordability gap, covering only 10 shares and therefore representing one-tenth of the notional value of a standard contract.
At launch, mini options were listed on a handful of highly liquid, high-priced underlyings including Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG), and a few ETFs like SPY and GLD. The premise was that retail traders could participate in covered call writing, protective put hedging, and other common strategies on these names without needing to hold 100 shares or commit large premium amounts on a single trade.
In practice, mini options never achieved the trading volumes that proponents expected. Bid-ask spreads in mini option markets tended to be wider relative to the smaller contract size than in standard options, eroding much of the cost advantage for retail traders. Institutional traders generally preferred standard contracts for efficiency. As a result, most exchanges have scaled back or delisted many mini option series.
For retail traders still interested in trading high-priced underlyings with modest capital, the practical alternatives today include standard options on fractional-share ETFs tracking those names, or options on lower-priced vehicles that offer similar exposure. The launch of fractional share programs at major U.S. broker-dealers has also reduced some of the original appeal of mini options for pure equity ownership.
Understanding mini options is still relevant because they illustrate a broader principle in derivatives design: contract size is a variable that exchanges can adjust to broaden market access, and the OCC is capable of clearing contracts with non-standard share counts when exchanges introduce them.