William Speth

Background

About William Speth

William (Bill) Speth has over 35 years of experience in options and futures markets and has held a variety of roles and positions that have provided invaluable insights into both the theory and practical application of options as investment management tools. Bill was Senior Vice President, Global Head of Research for Cboe Holdings, Inc, where he was primarily responsible for developing new products and opening new markets. He led the team that created VIX futures and VIX options, as well as other index and volatility derivatives. Bill founded Cboe’s index business, pioneered options-based strategy benchmark indexes, and was instrumental in the launch of the first “covered call” ETF and the first ETNs based on VIX futures. He has been a frequent contributor at Cboe’s Risk Management Conferences and has presented and written about the benefits of including options-based strategies in investment portfolios. Bill has worked with regulators and government officials to improve options market structure, on policies related to liquidity, risk-management, capital, and tax treatment for options, and to expand the use of options and futures in registered investment funds. Bill began his career as an options market maker in the Cboe trading pits, where he developed, refined, and implemented proprietary trading strategies using options on individual stocks and stock indexes. Bill was Interim Head of Research for the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) in 2019 and currently acts as Senior Advisor to the CEO. He served on the WFE Statistics Advisory Group from 2008 to 2019, recently as Vice-Chairman. He holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester and a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from LeMoyne College in Syracuse, NY.