Founded in 2003 by Chicago Board of Options Exchange (Cboe) alum Jere Wickert, TradingBlock began as a broker-dealer and has evolved over the years into a provider of sophisticated, customizable trading technology solutions. Wickert tells Digital Wealth News that the platform empowers financial professionals, RIAs (registered investment advisors), and retail traders to enhance portfolio performance, manage risk and create value in a zero-commission world.
In 2018, as demand grew for sophisticated trading solutions, the company started developing a new platform primarily geared toward mobile and allowing traders more control over their experience.
Today, 90% of TradingBlock’s operations involve exchange-listed equity and index options. On average, the company executes up to four million contracts per month, which is a significant number for a company with fewer than two dozen employees. TradingBlock’s success has granted them notable recognition across the trading space, including recognition as a top-rated online broker by Barron’s.
DWN recently spoke with TradingBlock’s Founder, President and CEO to learn more about the platform and how it meets its customers’ evolving needs.
Digital Wealth News: TradingBlock caters to a wide spectrum of traders, from the individual to the institutional. What is it about the platform that allows you to do this?
Jere Wickert: Our DNA is in the listed-options markets, serving primarily professional traders and institutions. As options trading has grown among retail traders and RIAs, we’ve doubled down on expanding our platform to meet and exceed their evolving needs. Our professional-grade technology is available to any type of trader across this spectrum. They all have access to the same tech stack.
There is an evolutionary process to a trader’s journey, so we’ve created a breadth of technology and services that recognize that transition. Our users can fully customize their trading environment, tailoring it to their experience level. This results in familiarity for all users while also, from the business side, streamlining the development of new features and ongoing support.
For our professional clients, we have developed a broker-neutral trading environment that allows them to build an execution platform structured around their strategy. This includes access to multiple professional trading platforms and executing brokers, custom order routing algorithm services, mini-prime services and API-certified access to all major option and equity exchanges.
DWN: What role does innovation play at TradingBlock, and how does the platform leverage technologies like algorithmic trading?
JW: “Made for the Way You Trade” is more than our tagline, it’s our mission. We actively listen to our customers, and their insights fuel our innovation, ensuring that every feature is designed to meet their evolving needs. Living by this motto has led to many platform developments, including customizable and confidential order routing algorithms designed to enhance order management and capital efficiency; a broker-neutral trading platform that lets traders design their own execution environment with access to multiple professional trading platforms and executing brokers; custom reporting that saves time and reduces complexity; and API connectivity that allows proprietary technology to be seamlessly integrated with order routing capabilities, allowing for flexible, robust trading infrastructure access.
For individual traders, our focus is on making data adaptable to their specific needs. From a technology perspective, modern online brokers, like exchanges, are essentially data companies that process trades. By prioritizing flexible UX design and constantly refining how data is consumed and displayed, we will always be positioned to adapt to the next big thing.
DWN: TradingBlock emphasizes trader education. Why is this so important?
JW: Simple: It’s about mitigating risk. Traders of all levels are looking to improve returns but often neglect that a primary driver behind better ROI is trading with reduced risk. Traders are also constantly searching for new strategies that might perform better under different market conditions. We’re thrilled to help our traders learn and grow.
Without education, a trader’s risk is multiplied as conditions change. With education, a trader has a better understanding of their potential risk (as well as reward) before committing capital to a given strategy. This can result in less risk exposure over time and, often, improved performance. When our customers succeed, we succeed.
DWN: What current trading trends is TradingBlock keeping an eye on, and how is the platform responding to them?
JW: Machine learning, the forerunner to AI, has been actively used on the professional trader side for years. AI plays a role for online brokers by helping manage data more effectively, giving clients clearer insights into its meaning, and improving operational efficiency, enabling firms to compete and innovate in a zero-commission environment. Regulators have not fully settled on the use of AI in many aspects of the trading or decision-making processes so we’re watching that issue closely.
We are also keeping an eye on whether zero-dated options (0DTE) will start trading on individual stocks. 0DTE (only available on a few Cboe indices right now) along with options with weekly expirations have been a major driver in options growth over the past few years as traders take a shorter-term view on market or macroeconomic events.
DWN: What developments or new offerings does TradingBlock have in store for the near future?
JW: We’re developing next-generation tools for idea generation and trade and portfolio risk analysis. Our focus is on delivering meaningful, actionable data—not just copying what other brokers do. When clients interact with data through scanning, filtering or risk analysis, it’s designed to provide real value.
For our professional clients, we help them find different approaches for executing their strategies, and we constantly monitor market initiatives for ways to improve execution flexibility that may benefit their strategy.
With our breadth of experience, we see how similar capabilities can be leveraged for different client segments. Often, the only difference lies in how the same data is communicated or displayed. Offering diverse ways to view and interact with data produced from the same engine allows us to be more in tune with how a particular client thinks. That’s why we designed our platform to be highly flexible, allowing it to grow with clients as their needs and thinking evolve.
