Hanweck

About Hanweck

Hanweck, formerly known as Hanweck Associates, operated as a provider of real-time risk and margin analytics for the global derivatives markets. The company was founded in 2003 by Gerald Hanweck, Jr., PhD, and Michael Hollingsworth. Gerald Hanweck's journey included an early career as a programmer, a PhD in managerial economics, and experience in the futures and equity options space, which revealed to him the market's need for faster, more powerful options analytics solutions. The firm initially started as a consulting business in 2006 before pivoting to product development.

This strategic shift was driven by the emergence of more advanced graphics processing units (GPUs) in the mid-2000s. Hanweck and Hollingsworth recognized the potential to leverage this hardware to deliver options calculations at a significantly higher speed than existing solutions. This led to the creation of Hanweck Analytics, founded on the principle of using GPU-based parallel processing to provide real-time, insightful analytics for an increasingly electronic options market. The firm's core product, the Volera® Engine, is a hardware-accelerated technology capable of processing high-volume market data feeds and performing millions of analytical calculations per second. This technology formed the basis of their risk analytics-as-a-service model.

Hanweck's client base primarily consisted of institutional financial entities, including banks, broker-dealers, hedge funds, central counterparties, and exchanges. The company provided these clients with tools for visibility into capital and balance sheet constraints through real-time margin calculations and analytics that help optimize portfolio allocations. Its services included Options Analytics, Portfolio & Margin Analytics, and Trading Indicators derived from options market data. For example, in 2018, the firm launched the Hanweck Borrow Intensity Indicator, which mined equity options market data to provide real-time insights into securities lending rates. On February 4, 2020, Cboe Global Markets, a major exchange holding company, announced its acquisition of Hanweck Associates, LLC. Following the acquisition, Hanweck was integrated into Cboe's Information Solutions group to enhance its suite of data, analytics, and risk management offerings, and now operates as Cboe Hanweck.