At 4:05 pm in New York, a large tech company releases earnings. The main stock session has ended, executives begin their conference call, and billions of dollars start shifting through every instrument connected to the company. Shares move across extended-hours venues, options desks recalculate volatility, index futures absorb the broader reaction, and investors in Asia prepare for their own trading day.
And now CME has placed another instrument inside that competition for the first credible price.
On July 27, the exchange launched 55 standard single-stock futures and 22 Micro versions linked to some of America’s most heavily traded companies, including Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. The contracts trade for 23 hours during the Sunday-to-Friday futures week, with a one-hour daily pause, giving investors another way to respond while the main US session is closed.
While this is a huge milestone for the financial market, it’s actually not the first time we’ve seen single-stock futures in the US. Their first major US launch came in November 2002 with backing from several of Chicago’s largest exchange operators, but the product spent almost two decades searching for an audience and never managed to find it. OneChicago stopped operating in September 2020, ending the first US experiment.
CME is now running the experiment once again. However, this time the contracts are being launched in a much different market, one that’s been spoiled by crypto, brokerage apps, same-day options, and the overwhelming need for assets to remain available at every hour of every day.
The futures contracts CME is now offering have changed only around the edges, but the traders most likely to use them have changed beyond recognition.
A leveraged stock position in one contract
A single-stock future is an agreement whose price follows one company’s shares. An Nvidia future follows Nvidia, a Tesla future follows Tesla, and an Apple future follows Apple.
The buyer receives economic exposure to the share price through a futures contract. At expiry, CME settles the difference in cash, so money moves according to the contract’s final value while the shares remain where they are.
CME’s standard contracts represent 100 shares, while its Micro contracts represent 10. At a futures price of $200, the standard version controls $20,000 of exposure, and the Micro controls $2,000. That total exposure is the contract’s notional value. A trader deposits a smaller amount to support the position, which creates leverage and magnifies every gain or loss.
The Micro format reveals plenty about who the intended audience for this product is. An institution managing billions of dollars doesn’t want or need a contract representing 10 shares. A brokerage customer trading from a phone can use that smaller contract to take a leveraged position without controlling tens of thousands of dollars in stock.
CME says the 55 underlying companies generate more than $200 billion in average daily notional activity. By index weight, they account for roughly 55% to 65% of both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100.
This product will reach deep into this group of companies driving America’s largest stock indices, including the tech names that dominate retail attention and global market performance.
The contract specifications explain how the product works, while investor behaviour explains why CME believes the timing has improved this time around.
The first single-stock futures came before their first customers
Single-stock futures spent much of the 1980s and 1990s inside a jurisdictional fight. A futures contract linked to an individual company found itself torn between securities and commodities regulation, leaving the SEC and CFTC fighting over who controlled the product.
Congress settled the dispute through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which lifted a 19-year prohibition and created joint SEC-CFTC oversight. The result became both a security under federal securities law and a future under commodities law, carrying requirements from two regulatory systems into a single contract.
OneChicago began trading 21 single-stock futures on November 8, 2002. By the end of that year, it had introduced 83 futures linked to individual companies and ETFs. CME, Cboe and the Chicago Board of Trade backed the venture, giving the launch serious institutional support and access to experienced derivatives operators.
The market survived for years and attracted some institutional use, but its scale remained tiny beside the options industry. OneChicago handled roughly 11.7 million contracts in 2015. A decade later, the options market in the US was handling an average of 61 million contracts in a single day.
Several forces worked against this product. Investors could already use calls and puts for leveraged exposure, while brokers and market makers had spent years building systems around options. Ordinary shares, sector funds, and broad index futures all offered additional ways to express essentially the same views, leaving single-stock futures with few advantages strong enough to overcome the liquidity concentrated elsewhere.
Any capital efficiency they might have had was further weakened by regulation. The original SEC-CFTC rules generally required customer margin equal to 20% of a security future’s market value. Regulators lowered the minimum to 15% in 2020, matching it with comparable portfolio margin products. The change was implemented shortly after OneChicago stopped trading, bringing relief only after the market had run out of time.
Traders prefer contracts with many buyers and sellers, narrow bid-ask spreads, and reliable execution. Those conditions draw more activity, which improves the market again. Thin participation creates the reverse cycle, with weaker pricing pushing customers towards established products.
OneChicago could build the venue, publish the specifications, and recruit market makers, but sustained demand still had to come from traders. Unfortunately, it never did.
Wall Street found the perfect leverage customer
The average American investor of 2026 looks absolutely nothing like the average investor of 2002. Commission-free platforms have put derivatives alongside ordinary shares, phone interfaces have reduced complex positions to just a few taps, and social media has turned market events into live entertainment followed by millions of people at once.
US options recorded their sixth consecutive annual volume record in 2025, with more than 15.2 billion contracts changing hands. Average daily volume reached 61 million contracts, while activity in options linked to individual stocks increased 28% from 2024.
Same-day options have become a market of their own. Contracts linked to the S&P 500 and expiring within hours averaged 2.3 million contracts each day in 2025, accounting for 59% of total SPX options activity. Investors who once bought shares and waited years now trade instruments whose entire lifespan fits inside an afternoon.
Robinhood is actually the platform that shows us the kind of customer CME hopes to reach. In May 2026, its users traded a whopping 231 million options contracts. The company’s customer margin balances reached $19.5 billion, more than double their level a year earlier, while monthly equity volume reached $315 billion.
While those numbers can’t guarantee demand for single-stock futures, they show there’s already a huge audience comfortable with directional leverage, expiration dates, and margin-backed exposure. CME no longer has to introduce the basic concept; it just has to persuade investors to use a different version of it.
In 2002, exchanges had to explain why an individual investor might want a leveraged contract linked to one company. In 2026, that investor may keep an options chain, a crypto exchange, and an overnight stock venue open across the same group of screens. Robinhood’s expansion across asset classes shows the broader race to build an everything platform around the same customer.
Crypto changed the clock
You can argue that crypto’s most lasting contribution to finance came from the expectations it created around access.
Bitcoin trades through weekends, holidays, elections, wars, and bank failures. Its price keeps moving when traditional exchanges close, training a generation of investors to see market closures as optional. Phones stay on, global news keeps moving, and capital always keeps looking for somewhere to respond.
CME has spent years trying to adapt its regulated crypto derivatives to that culture. Bitcoin Friday Futures represent 1/50 of a BTC and expire every Friday, combining a smaller contract with a short, familiar cycle. CME’s crypto futures and options processed nearly $3 trillion in notional value during 2025, with average open interest reaching about $26 billion.
In May 2026, CME extended regulated crypto derivatives to 24/7 trading. Two months later, it launched 23-hour futures on Nvidia, Tesla, and dozens of other major stocks. This shows how product ideas can migrate between markets: CME absorbed crypto’s schedule, then carried similar design choices into equities.
The first live weekends also revealed the risks that came with the new schedule. As CryptoSlate found after CME’s 24/7 launch, continuous execution still leaves liquidity, leverage, and business-day settlement as questions without answers.
The stock contracts are structurally distinct from crypto perpetual futures. CME’s products expire quarterly, settle in cash, and operate within a jointly regulated securities-futures framework. Crypto perpetuals usually continue without a traditional expiry and use recurring funding payments to keep their prices aligned with the underlying asset.
Their shared appeal comes from direct long or short exposure, leverage, and access beyond the conventional stock exchange day. Crypto normalized those features for individual customers, and traditional finance has begun reorganizing itself around the resulting demand.
Crypto platforms are expanding into stocks and equity-linked products, while traditional exchanges adopt the longer hours and smaller leveraged contracts associated with crypto.
The race to own the first price
CME’s launch is part of a broader expansion of US trading hours. Nasdaq has been preparing a 23-hour weekday schedule, while NYSE Arca has pursued a comparable extension. Every major venue wants a larger share of the activity taking place outside the regular session.
Crypto-native platforms are applying the same pressure, just from outside Wall Street. They’ve already offered weekend exposure linked to the S&P 500 and brought 24/7 derivatives to commodities traditionally controlled by large futures exchanges.
This creates a contest over price formation during the hours when the main US market is closed. When Nvidia releases earnings after the bell, its shares can move on extended-hours systems, its single-stock future can trade on CME, and index futures can absorb the effect across the wider market. Each platform wants to become the place where investors trust the first reaction.
That position carries enormous commercial value. The platform with the deepest overnight liquidity attracts market makers, institutional hedging, retail orders and data customers, reinforcing its position as activity grows.
Brokerages also face the same incentive. A platform offering shares, options, futures, and crypto can keep customer collateral and attention inside one ecosystem for more hours each day. Product breadth becomes the most important distribution strategy, with every new market creating another reason for customers to stay.
CME approached this race from the exchange side. Its scale across interest rates, commodities, stock indices, and crypto allows customers to manage several forms of risk within one derivatives venue. Single-stock futures provide a direct link to the companies dominating retail attention while extending CME’s reach into hours previously associated with crypto exchanges and specialist overnight platforms.
Extended access can be useful after earnings releases, geopolitical events, and central bank decisions. It also creates more hours during which participation may be thin.
FINRA warns that extended-hours trading often involves fewer counterparties, higher volatility, wider bid-ask spreads, and inconsistent prices across venues. Orders may receive partial execution, fill at an inferior price or remain unfilled. Leverage makes each of those risks more expensive.
Micro contracts reduce the absolute size of a position while preserving the economic properties of futures, including margin requirements, daily gains and losses, and the possibility of rapid changes in required collateral. Smaller contracts expand access, although they don’t remove the danger that comes with leverage.
A 23-hour future creates value when market makers remain active, and customers provide enough volume to support competitive prices. During thin periods, the same product can offer access at a high execution cost.
The first US attempt showed us just how important that distinction is. Product design opens a platform, but concentrated participation creates a functioning market.
The second attempt begins
CME has addressed many of the weaknesses that followed the 2002 experiment. Cash settlement simplifies expiry, Micro contracts reduce position size, trading hours cover most of the weekday, and the initial list focuses on companies with immense underlying activity. The potential customer now also comes with years of experience in options, leveraged funds, and crypto derivatives.
The liquidity single-stock futures manage to attract will decide whether they turn out to be a success.
First-week volume, open interest, overnight participation, and bid-ask spreads will reveal more than CME’s launch list. Broker support will shape access, market-maker commitment will shape execution, and concentration in Nvidia, Tesla and a handful of other names may determine whether the wider product group develops or becomes a catalogue with only a few active contracts.
The launch measures whether crypto’s operating assumptions can migrate into the centre of American equity finance. Continuous access, smaller leveraged contracts, and a global customer unconstrained by the New York trading day have already changed digital assets. CME is now testing the same appetite across the companies that dominate the US stock market.
Single-stock futures entered a world of desktop brokerage, expensive commissions, and an options market with a powerful distribution advantage when they launched 24 years ago. In 2026, however, they enter a world where millions of customers trade derivatives from their phones, CME processes trillions of dollars in crypto exposure, and the largest US exchanges are preparing for near-continuous equity sessions.
Those conditions give CME a much stronger opening than OneChicago ever had. The exchange can design the contract, reduce its size, and extend the clock, while sustained participation will decide whether the second attempt produces a durable market.
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