The focus on options did not arise because they were important financial instruments: they were not. The Great Crash of 1929 reignited the traditional hostility to options, which were widely seen as implicated in the excesses and abuses of the 1920s. An outright federal ban on stock-option trading was only just averted (Filer 1959), and such trading continued only in a small, illiquid, ad hoc market based in New York. In general, only brokers' price quotations could be obtained from that market, not the actual prices at which options were bought and sold. The absence of robust price data was a disadvantage of the options traded in New York from the viewpoint of financial economists.

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 530