Commentary
IG Group keeps trying to predict prediction markets
ELMHURST, IL (JLN) — July 31, 2026: IG Group has been trying to predict the prediction market business for nearly two decades. Its record looks like that of a trader who gets in early, loses conviction, sells, buys back, sells again, and then discovers that the market has gone limit-up without him or her.
Now IG is getting back in, this time with both feet, several licenses and up to $1.3 billion.
The story begins with HedgeStreet, the wonderfully named California exchange founded in 2004 to offer small, easily understood derivatives to retail traders. The products were called “Hedgelets,” which sounds like either a financial instrument or something served with mustard at a British garden party.
The Call Is Coming from Inside the White House: Senate Democrats’ Forum Lays Out the National Security and Retail-Investor Case Against the CLARITY Act
WILLIAMS BAY, WI (JLN) — July 29, 2026: On Capitol Hill on Monday, Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) convened a Senate Democratic forum broadcast on YouTube on what they’re calling the “cryptocorruption” flowing out of the Trump White House and into the pending CLARITY Act, the digital-asset market-structure bill now working its way toward the Senate floor. They were joined by Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and they took testimony from five witnesses: actor-turned-crypto-investigator Ben McKenzie Schenkkan; North Carolina scam victim Lori Flowers; former SEC Internet Enforcement chief John Reed Stark; Democracy Defenders Action ethics counsel Virginia Canter; and Transparency International U.S. deputy executive director Scott Greytak.
CME’s Innovator’s Dilemma: Read the Book, or Become the Case Study
Perpetual futures are the classic low-end disruptor. The only question is whether CME builds the exchange that eats its own margins — or waits for a consortium to build it first.
WILLIAMS BAY, WI (JLN) — July 27, 2026: CME Group is living in a Clayton Christensen case study and doesn’t even have to buy the book to see how it ends. The lesson is already in its own stock chart, its margin profile, and the shadow cast by perpetual futures. The only question is whether CME wants to be the incumbent in the book…or the disruptor in the sequel.
Duffy Goes Down Swinging — But Don’t Let Perpetuals Become the Next E-mini
Duffy Goes Down Swinging — But Don’t Let Perpetuals Become the Next E-mini
ELMHURST, IL (JLN) — July 23, 2026: Give Terry Duffy this much: the man does not do lame duck. On one of his final CME Group earnings calls as chief executive, the outgoing chairman and CEO came out swinging, pulling no punches on the industry’s most active newswire topics in the derivatives business, from prediction markets and sports “event” contracts drifting into what he flatly calls gambling, to the rush toward perpetual futures, to the CFTC’s willingness to bless it all. Duffy has always been at his best when he has something to defend and someone to argue with, and with the exit door in sight, he is using the last of his platform to plant flags for the CME Group he built.
On perpetuals, though, I think he is fighting the last war.
Buy the Truth, Sell the Delayed Fact
Selling Wall Street a head start on the president’s market-moving posts is a two-tier market in the making, and regulators shouldn’t wait to act
WILLIAMS BAY, WI (JLN) — July 20, 2026: Trump Media & Technology Group says Truth API will give institutional customers “licensed, real-time access” to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts beginning August 1, with customers already signed and more onboarding, a 24/7 feed, machine-readable delivery “in milliseconds,” and an archive back to 2022. The company says the customers include “high-frequency and algorithmic trading firms” that need a low-latency feed rather than manual tracking, and interim CEO Kevin McGurn put the pitch plainly: “Markets already move on Truth Social posts.” Reuters reported that Trump Media discussed charging Wall Street traders and investment firms as much as $100,000 a month for the fastest feed, with another $60,000-a-month three-year plan also pitched.
Pat Kenny Didn’t Retire. He Just Walked Away
After four decades in derivatives, trading technology, and public service, Pat Kenny is spending the summer on Geneva Lake and plotting his next act WILLIAMS BAY, WI (JLN) — July 13, 2026: Pat Kenny, the most interesting man in the world, as I have repeatedly called...
While Wall Street Empties Its Desks, Prediction Markets Are Just Getting Started
When Wall Street empties out for summer, prediction markets are just hitting their stride, and the numbers from Kalshi and Polymarket’s record-breaking World Cup run should have financial services firms paying close attention
WILLIAMS BAY, WI (JLN) — July 10, 2026: Every summer, the same thing happens. The asset managers pack their bags for the Hamptons, the hedge fund traders head to the Vineyard, and the trading floors of the world’s great financial institutions thin out like a summer Friday afternoon on the old Merc trading floor. NYSE trading volumes drop 20 to 40 percent from their winter peaks. July is historically the lightest trading month of the year, with volumes running as much as 28% below March, which is typically the heaviest month. The VIX hits its annual lows right around now, averaging 17.84 in July historically. Block sizes shrink. Price moves happen on low conviction. You get more noise and less signal. A junior trader breathing too hard on the wrong side can move a stock. Welcome to the summer doldrums.
Novel Products: Why I’ve Always Leaned Into the Next New Thing
Security futures, carbon markets, crypto, prediction markets, perpetuals — a personal history of the products that made regulators nervous and incumbents angry
WILLIAMS BAY, WI (JLN) — July 8, 2026: I have always believed that markets exist to solve problems. The futures market was born to help farmers and merchants manage risk and to discover price. Options were created to give investors flexibility and to give math nerds jobs. And somewhere along the way, someone always has an idea for a product that doesn’t fit neatly into any existing box, and that’s where things get interesting.
That spirit of restless innovation is why we created the Novel Products section at John Lothian News. We wanted a home for the products that don’t fit neatly into the established categories: prediction markets, perpetual futures, the re-emerging world of single-stock futures, sports betting and gambling products with derivatives characteristics, and whatever comes next. These are the products that make regulators nervous, that make incumbents angry, and that make me lean forward in my chair.
I’ve been leaning forward in that chair for a long time.
What I Would Have Said at Mount Rushmore
Trump Warned of Communism. I Would Have Made the Case for Capitalism.
WILLIAMS BAY, WI (JLN) ― July 6, 2026: Standing in the shadow of four presidents carved into granite, I would not have warned the crowd about communism, as President Donald Trump did. Not because communism isn’t a failed system ― it plainly is ― but because warning people about failure is easy. The harder, more honest, more American thing to do is to defend what we have, explain why it works, acknowledge where it doesn’t, and commit to fixing it. That is what I would have said.
Perpetual Futures and the Illusion They Were Built to Escape
WILLIAMS BAY, WI (JLN) ― June 22, 2026: The story of perpetual crypto futures begins not with a brilliant product design but with a structural failure in the asset class they were supposed to track. When centralized cryptocurrency exchanges began operating in earnest in the early 2010s, they promised traders direct participation in a new decentralized monetary system built on blockchain technology. The appeal was powerful, peer-to-peer, trustless, and immutable. But the moment a retail trader deposited bitcoin or any other token onto an exchange to trade it, that promise dissolved. The blockchain was left behind. What happened next occurred entirely inside the exchange’s internal ledger, as opaque and centralized as any traditional clearing system, stripped entirely of the protections blockchain was supposed to provide. Traders were not holding bitcoin; they were holding an IOU from an operator whose books they could not inspect, whose custody practices they could not audit, and whose insolvency or malfeasance could wipe them out overnight. The decentralization that made crypto alluring was, for exchange traders, an illusion from the start.
The CFTM’s One-Man Rule Is an Affront to Markets and Democracy
ELMHURST, IL (JLN) ― JUNE 17, 2026: The United States Congress did not create the Commodity Futures Trading Commission so that one man could sit atop a tower of unchecked power and remake derivatives, prediction markets, and crypto in his own image. It created a five‑member commission, balanced and bipartisan by design, to referee some of the most systemically important and politically sensitive markets in the world. Today, that design has been effectively scrapped. What we have instead is the “CFTM,” or the “Commodity Futures Trading Monolith,” presided over by a single “Commissar,” Michael Selig, who has consolidated sweeping authority over prediction markets and an expanded crypto mandate at the very moment those markets most need legitimacy, process, and restraint. Welcome to the Office of the Commissar.
How AI Became Our Newsroom’s Most Productive Staff Member
ELMHURST, IL (JLN) ― June 10, 2026: A new Nasdaq Economic Institute report makes a compelling case that AI is driving a wave of solo entrepreneurship, with one-person business applications up more than 20% since early 2025, concentrated in high-productivity sectors such as technology, finance, and professional services. The argument is straightforward: AI tools have lowered the cost of execution so dramatically that ideas that once required a small team can now be built and run by a single person with a subscription and a browser. This is an idea I have long championed.
Perpetual Futures Are Swaps in Futures Clothing and the CFTC Is Letting It Slide
ELMHURST, IL (JLN) — June 5, 2026: Every week, the CFTC sends me its Swaps Report. Every week, I read it. And every week, I find myself returning to the same question: Does the agency that publishes this report actually know what a swap is anymore?
I ask that not as a provocation but as a genuine inquiry. Because on May 29, 2026, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved KalshiEX LLC’s bitcoin perpetual contract, BTCPERP, and formally classified it as a futures contract. A futures contract. Not a swap. At the same time, the CFTC has spent the better part of this year arguing in courtrooms, comment letters, and its own rulemaking proceedings that Kalshi’s event contracts – binary bets on sports outcomes and political events – are swaps.
Selig the Joker: When the CFTC Chair Becomes the Punchline
SARASOTA, FL (JLN) – May 11, 2026 – I am not a gambler. I don’t have a weekly poker game with some buddies. In fact, I don’t even play solitaire on my phone. I always thought that being a futures broker was enough risk for me, and I did not need to create any more, even if it was “friendly” wagering.
However, somehow, amid the prediction market debate, I have found myself more often on the side of the gaming lobby than of a rogue, single-commissioner, chairman-led CFTC.
When Bill Miller, the head of the American Gaming Association, stands at the Economic Club of Las Vegas and calls the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission “quite frankly, a joke,” the easy reaction in our industry is to dismiss it as a casino lobbyist defending turf. I think that reaction is wrong. Miller said out loud what a growing number of derivatives professionals, people who actually hedge corn, crude, Treasuries, and currencies for a living, have been muttering for months. Michael Selig is, in fact, behaving like the joker in a deck of cards. The trouble is that the joke is on the markets the CFTC was built to protect.
Thomas J. Cashman, CBOT Pillar, FIA Hall of Famer and Mentor to a Generation, Dies at 87
From the soybean pit to village hall and the 100 Club, the 50-year Chicago Board of Trade member, who died Saturday at 87, left a lasting mark on the futures industry, his community, and the people he quietly helped.
LAKE CITY, FL (JLN) ― May 4, 2026 ― Thomas J. Cashman, a 50-year member of the Chicago Board of Trade, head of an iconic CBOT family, and a member of the FIA Hall of Fame, passed away early Saturday morning at the age of 87. Tom was my mentor, my friend, and my entrée into the futures industry.
Longshots Losing 98% of Time Dominate Kalshi, Polymarket Trading
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff This is not going to end well. A 23-karat gold-leaf statue depicting a naked Donald Trump, titled "The Orange Plague – King of Injustice," has been unveiled at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Suha Kidwai...
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The Spread
Options Discovery Episode 34: Retail Options Trend
Today, we’re diving into the dynamic world of retail options trading, a trend that is reshaping the landscape of trading and investment strategies. Retail options trading has seen a significant uptick in participation since the second quarter of 2020.
FanDuel Lands FCM License, But CME Isn’t Involved
LEAD FanDuel Lands FCM License, But CME Isn’t Involved Todd Shriber - Casino.org News FanDuel has secured a futures commission merchant (FCM) license through the National Futures Association, paving the way for the gaming giant to directly broker event contracts and...
