The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) announced that a seat, or membership, at CBOE was sold for a new all-time record price of $850,000 on Monday, December 19.
This surpassed the previous CBOE all-time record seat price of $800,000 set on Thursday, December 8, 2005, and became the sixth record seat price set during the month of December.
The record sale of $850,000 is an increase of 184% over the seat sale of $299,000 from January 6th, which was the first seat transaction of 2005. Through the end of the day Monday, 103 seats have been bought and sold at CBOE this year. By comparison, a total of 66 seats sold at CBOE for the entire year of 2004.
Seats are bought and sold via CBOE’s membership department using an auction method in which bids and offers are submitted to the Exchange on an as-desired basis, and should a certain bid match a certain offer, a sale is made and the respective parties are notified.