drew

also the spreads are thicc, as already noted

O dang So is this pointng towards a physics-modelers Vs taleb style risk-smart, market-smart Culture split too?

has more to do with the computational reality of having to constantly price the options chain, there are ~1M listed options but only ~5000 US equities, in an effort to make the business economical for options market makers, exchanges give them tools not available in equities

an example of this is purge ports, something unique to options, they're a dedicated connect that skips the regular message queue so that MMs can kill their quotes en masse, no such thing exists in equities. here's a doc for the CBOE purge port for example: https://cdn.cboe.com/resources/features/Cboe_USO_PurgePortsFAQs.pdf …

this implies that while an equities MM has to care a ton about making sure their quotes are super up-to-the-microsecond recent so as not to get picked off by an aggressor on-exchange, the options MM can just kill and reprice the whole chain if they think they'll be picked off

disclosure, i am not an options MM by profession so perhaps take the above with a grain of salt, i have only seen this from the buyside/"end-user" POV myself

cc @theemilyaccount to factcheck/own me on any mistakes above lol

kill whole chain expensive. options MM a lot more about exchange pricing from my experience