Pratik knew trading was his calling two decades ago, when he used profits from trading options as a grad student at Stanford to pay for his engineering degree.
Since then, he spent his career at top-tier HFT and prop trading firms — building quantitative strategies across equities, fixed income, and options, and launching a highly profitable global options market-making business from scratch.
After two decades of operating at the cutting edge of derivatives markets, Pratik thinks about options systematically. Building a system requires data — lots of it — along with the right tools for normalizing and analyzing that data rigorously.
In 2025, when he stepped away from proprietary trading, he explored what was available to retail options traders. He was deeply disappointed. Most platforms look polished on the surface but are built on fundamentally flawed data underneath. They exploit the gap between what looks impressive and what's actually correct — confusing traders with jargon and flashy interfaces while feeding them Black-Scholes approximations that professionals abandoned years ago.
For someone who has spent decades building systems where every basis point matters, the gap was staggering. The data that proprietary options trading desks rely on — proper American vol pricing, accurate implied rates, borrows, forwards, intraday vol surfaces — simply don't exist for individual traders. The data quality that professionals take for granted is nowhere to be found in the retail space.
Pratik initially set out to build this infrastructure for himself — the backend data, the vol fitting engine, the analytics — so he could deploy systematic strategies on his own. But as he built, he kept hearing the same thing from friends and fellow traders:
"I want to think about options the way you do, but I don't have 20 years of experience pricing and trading volatility."
That's how OptionSpace.ai was born — to give every options trader access to the same data quality and analytical rigor that was previously locked behind institutional walls.