CME Resumes Individual Stock Futures, Reclaims Trading Entry

CME is pushing for regulatory constraints on competitors, attempting to capture the educated leveraged retail investors, but the outlook remains uncertain.

Written by: Conflux

On July 27, 2026, CME Group reintroduced individual stock futures (SSF, Single Stock Futures), covering 55 standard contracts and 22 micro contracts, with underlying assets including Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, and even the newly listed SpaceX. The trading hours have been extended to 23 hours a day (with only a 1-hour maintenance window). This type of contract first appeared in the U.S. market 24 years ago but ultimately did not become a mainstream trading product due to insufficient trading activity.

After many years, the relaunch is not based on new technology but rather on a new battlefield—the demand from retail investors for around-the-clock leverage, which has already been educated by perpetual contracts in the cryptocurrency space. CME is filling the same entry point but using its oldest pricing logic. What it truly wants to guard against is a trading habit that has already been validated by new trading platforms.

23 Hours, Who is CME Pursuing?

The answer is not in the product manual but in the stock prices.

In early June 2026, after the CFTC approved the Bitcoin perpetual contract (BTCPERP) on the U.S. prediction market platform Kalshi, the exchange sector collectively declined: the Cboe, a U.S. options exchange, fell nearly 9% in one day, while CME and the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) each dropped about 4%. The market's concern was not that Bitcoin futures would lose business but that once the structure of perpetual contracts was allowed to enter more traditional assets, it could directly cut into the retail leveraged trading demand that exchanges value most.

The fuse was lit even earlier. Before SpaceX's official listing, Hyperliquid was already offering perpetual contracts for SpaceX, allowing retail investors to bet on the company around the clock without waiting for the IPO bell. This is a significant stimulus for traditional derivatives exchanges like CME: the entry point is being opened by others.

CME's response is not to replicate perpetual contracts but to repackage and relaunch its most proficient old tool—individual stock futures. Morgan Stanley analyst Michael Cyprys referred to this relaunch as the biggest growth catalyst for retail business this year in a report, noting that over 35 brokerages are ready for first-day access.

Where are the Costs Hidden?

However, if CME wants to capture perpetual contract users, the biggest issue is not whether leverage is available but where the two products fundamentally differ.

Perpetual contracts and traditional futures both superficially use margin to gain price exposure, but their cost structures are entirely different.

Perpetual contracts have no fixed expiration date and typically maintain contract prices close to spot prices through funding rates. Funding fees are settled between long and short holders at agreed intervals, allowing traders to directly see the current funding rate and corresponding holding costs.

CME's SSF, on the other hand, is a traditional future with a clear expiration date and lacks the funding fee mechanism of perpetual contracts. Its holding costs are primarily reflected in the basis between futures prices and spot prices.

In simple terms, the theoretical price of futures is influenced by risk-free interest rates, remaining time to expiration, expected dividends, and other factors. For high-growth stocks like Nvidia and Tesla, which have low or no dividends, if other conditions remain unchanged, futures typically trade at a premium (contango) relative to spot prices due to higher funding costs than dividend yields. Theoretical financing costs for individual stock futures are close to the short-term risk-free interest rate (such as SOFR) minus the dividend yield, with quarterly contracts for such stocks typically reflecting an implied annual financing cost of about 4% to 6%. For high-dividend stocks, dividend yields may offset or even exceed financing costs, leading to futures trading at a discount (backwardation), where long holders may gain implied returns. Therefore, the absence of a separate

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