Elwood Adds Post-Trade Connectivity To Bullish For Options

A desk that trades options on a venue usually books the same trade twice. Once at the venue, where it is matched and confirmed electronically, and again by hand in the risk system, where somebody retypes the economics so the position appears in the book. It's this second booking that often carries the risk, and it's the one that won't get checked until a break turns up. 

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From today, Monday 11 October 2026, Elwood's platform fetches clients' options trades directly from Bullish Exchange. The fetched record supports two operating models, and the desk chooses which one it runs: keep booking manually and reconcile those bookings against the venue record, or have the trades booked automatically and take the manual step out. Live market data for Bullish Exchange options prices runs alongside both.

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Post-trade connectivity is what makes either model possible, because both depend on the platform holding the venue's version of the trade.

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What makes an option different to book

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A spot or perpetual fill is a small number of fields, and most of them are implied by the instrument. For options, strike, expiry, style, direction, premium, underlying, notional and settlement terms all have to reach the risk system intact before the position is represented correctly, and together they pick out one contract from a long list of live ones.

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That makes manual booking a different kind of exposure. A mistyped quantity on a spot fill is visible against the balance. A mistyped strike on an option is not visible against anything, because there is no balance to check it against. It sits in the book as a plausible position and misprices the desk's Greeks until somebody reconciles it.

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To date, getting options trades from a venue into a risk system has been a fragmented experience:

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• No venue-side record to check against: The risk system holds the booking and nothing beside it, so there is nothing to reconcile it to. An error in the booking is an error in the book.

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• Economics that do not self-validate: Strike and expiry pick out the contract, and a wrong one lands the desk in a different contract that looks entirely reasonable and prices entirely wrongly.

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• A lag between trade and book: The position is not in the risk system until somebody types it there, so the desk's exposure is understated for as long as the queue is.

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• Manual effort that scales with volume: Booking effort grows with the number of tickets, so the operational cost of trading options rises in step with the strategy.

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What does automated options booking need to do?

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• Hold the venue's record as well as the desk's: The point of the fetch is a second, independent version of the trade. Without it, reconciliation has nothing to compare.

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• Carry the full economics: Strike, expiry, style, direction, premium and notional, so the position prices correctly rather than approximately.

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• Let the desk choose its operating model: Some books require a human in the booking loop and some do not. The same data should support either.

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• Value on live prices: Market data for the instrument, so the position marks against current prices rather than the last figure somebody entered.

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• Land in the same book as everything else: The options position needs to sit with spot, perpetual futures and the rest of the portfolio, rather than in an adjacent record that gets joined up later.

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How does Elwood support Bullish options?

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Elwood is a portfolio management system for 24/7 markets - across traditional and digital asset positions - running execution tooling, portfolio management, risk, collateral and reconciliation on one normalised data set. Through the platform the team can:

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• Fetch options trades executed on Bullish through direct post-trade connectivity

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• Reconcile trades, positions and balances into a consolidated retained record

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• Book options automatically from the fetched venue record, removing the manual booking step

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• Continue booking manually where the book requires it, with the fetched record as the reconciliation reference

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• Price positions on live Bullish options market data

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• Hold options alongside spot, perpetual futures, derivatives and loans on one system

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• Drill into exposures, Greeks and P&L decomposition across strategies and asset classes

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• Connectivity to custodians, exchanges and liquidity providers through direct integration

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How a fetched trade behaves

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A trade executed on Bullish is fetched with its economics attached. Where the desk books automatically, the position is created from that record, so the platform's version and the venue's version start from the same data. Where the desk books manually, the fetched record sits alongside the manual booking as the thing it is reconciled against, and a mismatch in strike, expiry, quantity or premium surfaces as a break rather than as a risk number nobody has questioned.

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Either way the position joins the same book as the rest of the portfolio. Fund-level exposure includes the options leg, and a hedge against an options position sits in the same risk view as the position it hedges.

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Where the division of labour sits

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Elwood provides the connectivity, the record, the reconciliation and the risk analytics. The client trades on Bullish under its own venue relationship, and makes its own execution and hedging decisions. Elwood does not route or execute orders at Bullish; the integration covers market data and post-trade connectivity.

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Who is this for?

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The integration is live with institutional clients from launch. It will also be relevant for:

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• Desks trading options on Bullish: The venue record reaches the risk system without anyone retyping it.

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• Operations and middle office: Reconciliation runs against a real second source, so breaks are findable rather than assumed absent.

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• Risk functions: Options exposure reflects what was actually traded, on live prices, in the same view as the rest of the book.

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• Desks scaling options volume: Booking effort stops rising in step with ticket count.

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Why does this matter for desks trading options?

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Booking by hand was workable while options were an occasional overlay on a book driven by spot and perpetuals. It stops being workable when options carry a material share of the risk, when the Greeks drive the hedging programme, and when a misbooked strike moves a number the desk is managing to.

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Connectivity changes what the choice is about. With the venue record in the platform, a desk that wants a human in the loop keeps one and gains a check on it. A desk that does not can remove the step entirely. Neither was available while the booking stood alone.

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What Elwood and Bullish say

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"Options are where manual booking hurts most, because an option carries terms that nothing downstream can sanity-check. Having a direct integration and fetching trades from venues like Bullish allows us to reconcile manual bookings or automatically update their risk, so our customers can trade off an accurate, current view of their portfolio.”

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• Josh Taylor, Head of Product, Elwood

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“Connecting our options market to the systems institutions already use is an important part of building out the institutional infrastructure around Bullish. Through our integration with Elwood, mutual clients can bring Bullish options trades directly into their existing portfolio, risk and operational workflows, alongside the rest of their digital asset activity.”

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•  Chris Tyrer, President of Bullish Exchange

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About Bullish

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Bullish (NYSE: BLSH) is an institutionally focused global digital asset platform that provides regulated market infrastructure and information services. This includes Bullish Exchange – an institutionally focused digital assets spot and derivatives exchange, integrating a high-performance central limit order book matching engine with automated market making to provide deep and predictable liquidity. Bullish Europe is regulated under MiCAR as a crypto asset service provider offering spot trading and custody services for digital assets.

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Get started

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info@elwood.io | elwood.io

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For professional clients only. Not for retail clients. 

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Elwood is a technology provider; clients trade through their own venue and counterparty relationships. Nothing in this communication constitutes investment, tax or legal advice.

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