Who Owns tastytrade?

The business began in 2011 as tastytrade, a financial media network founded by Tom Sosnoff, Tony Battista, Kristi Ross, and Scott Sheridan. Sosnoff and Sheridan were already known in the industry for building thinkorswim, the options trading platform sold to TD Ameritrade in 2009 for roughly $606 million. tastytrade applied the same philosophy of probabilistic options trading to daily video programming broadcast from Chicago, covering trade mechanics, volatility, and strategy in a format closer to a trading desk than financial television.

The founders launched a brokerage arm called tastyworks in 2017, building a new trading platform designed around the options strategies promoted on the network. tastyworks offered $1 commissions to open option positions with no charge to close, a pricing model that undercut most established brokers at the time.

In April 2021, IG Group announced it would acquire tastytrade, Inc. for approximately $1 billion, paid through a combination of cash and newly issued IG shares that made the tastytrade founders significant IG shareholders. The deal closed in June 2021 and gave IG a significant US retail presence it had lacked since selling its earlier US operations. In February 2022 the brokerage dropped the tastyworks name and adopted the parent brand, tastytrade, unifying the media network and the brokerage under one identity.

Under IG ownership the business has expanded beyond its options core. It added cryptocurrency trading, rebuilt the tastylive network, and in 2026 began moving into prediction markets, a direction reinforced when IG announced its proposed acquisition of US prediction markets operator Underdog in July 2026. CEO Mike Vaughan, who took over leadership of the US business, reported in October 2026 that tastytrade revenue had grown 92% since the acquisition while holding EBITDA margins in the mid-40% range.