Tomorrow will be a climactic moment in a competitive battle between the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), Kalshi, and Coinbase over stock “perps,” a crypto-inspired derivative that uses perpetually-rolling futures funding to create leveraged instruments for betting on stock prices.
Despite a US district judge leaning toward a conclusion that “the CFTC lacks statutory authority to allow perpetual derivatives on individuals stocks to be offered to retail investors,” tomorrow, Michael Selig’s commission must explain why that preliminary conclusion about perps is wrong if it wants to file an opposition.
Tomorrow’s deadline arose after a Tuesday lawsuit filing against the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in Manhattan by a trade group that counts the powerful CBOE and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities among its members.
The group, the Capital Markets Alliance (CMA), is seeking to halt a variety of approvals for stock perps listings.
Kalshi listed four contracts on Tuesday at up to 4.9x leverage: Costco, McDonald’s, Qualcomm, and Amgen.
The roster has since swelled to dozens of stock perps, including Nvidia, Tesla, and even SpaceX.
Hours after Tuesday’s filing, US District Judge Valerie Caproni ordered the CFTC to respond by Friday, November 6. Although Caproni denied an immediate restraining order over “conjectural” harm declarations, she found CMA “likely to succeed on the merits of its claim.”
Tomorrow, the CFTC must convince the court that her preliminary conclusion is wrong.
The CFTC’s 45-day review clock about these perps expired on November 2 without sufficient objection.
The next morning, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig hailed the launch of perps on US exchanges as an opportunity to pull traders from so-called “offshore, and often unregulated, venues,” with Kalshi immediately launching several stock perps.
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