Two numbers describe the listing pipeline for event contracts, and they come from the same agency. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission wrote in footnote 9 of its March 2026 advance notice that designated contract markets listed an average of about five event contracts a year between 2006 and 2020, and that in 2025 they certified roughly 1,600. The second number is the review mechanism those certifications pass through. Under Commission Regulation 40.2(a)(2), the Commission has to receive the submission by the open of business on the business day before the product lists. One business day, and no requirement anywhere in that rule that anybody read it first.
This is not a story about a regulator falling behind. It is about where a gate sits once arithmetic has moved it, and about the Commission having written down in plain terms where it thinks that gate sits. For an exchange the consequence is practical. The filter that decides what trades is the one inside the venue, applied before the filing goes out, because by the time anything downstream can act the contract is live.
Both documents start from five a year and then disagree about 2021
The advance notice of 16 March 2026 and the public interest proposal of 12 June 2026 were issued seven weeks apart under the same regulatory identifier, RIN 3038-AF65. Both anchor the growth story on the same historical baseline of roughly five contracts a year. They then give different figures for the year the curve turned.
Footnote 9 of the advance notice puts 2021 at 131 and says the annual figure "remained at a similar level until 2025". Footnote 303 of the Commission's June proposal describes a dramatic increase "from roughly five per year historically to more than 220 in 2021, with over 8,000 contracts trading in May 2026". Two primary documents, two counts for the same year, and the gap is not a rounding difference.
We are not going to guess which one is right. What matters for a listing standard is narrower. If the agency reviewing these products has two figures for the year its own workload changed shape, nobody outside it can calibrate against an official number either, and the only defensible figure is one you count yourself.
Counting the public register yourself returns 2,067 for 2026 alone
Footnote 9 points readers to the Commission's own register of certified products, filtered to certified products in the Event category. Read in full on 2 October 2026, that register holds 5,048 rows. Grouped by the date each row carries, it reads like this: 125 in 2021, 94 in 2022, 205 in 2023, 881 in 2024, 1,601 in 2025, and 2,067 in the first nine months of 2026.
Three things fall out. The 2025 figure matches the Commission's "approximately 1,600" almost exactly, a reasonable check that register and footnote count the same thing. The 2021 figure of 125 sits close to the advance notice and well below the proposal. And the claim that the annual level held steady until 2025 is hard to reconcile with 881 rows dated 2024 in the register the footnote cites.
The 2026 rows are the part an exchange should sit with. Spread across the business days to 1 October, they average about ten and a half certifications every business day. They are also accelerating inside the year: 65 rows dated January, 84 in March, 244 in July, 612 in August, 659 in September. September 2026 on its own carries more certified event products than 2021, 2022 and 2023 added together. The filings also stopped being one venue's habit. Six organisations have rows dated 2025; ten have rows dated 2026.
One business day is the entire gap between filing and trading
Regulation 40.2 is what most of these rows travel on. It asks the exchange to file electronically, to include the information in appendix D, the contract rules, the intended listing date, a certification of compliance, and what the rule calls "a concise explanation and analysis that is complete with respect to the product's terms and conditions". It also requires the venue to certify that it posted notice of the pending certification and a copy of the submission on its own website, concurrent with the filing.
What it does not contain is a waiting period for review. The submission has to arrive by the open of business on the business day before listing, and then the product lists. The slower route exists and almost nobody uses it for event contracts, which is the subject of a separate piece on Regulation 40.3. The 5,048 rows in the register are all certified, not approved.
Set ten and a half certifications a business day against a one business day window and the shape of the problem is visible without any argument about resources. Even a reviewer who began the moment a filing landed would be reading it alongside the trading, not before it.
Fifteen years of the Special Rule produced three ninety day reviews
The dedicated review tool for event contracts in this category is the ninety day review in Commission Regulation 40.11(c), which lets the Commission notify a venue of a potential violation, ask it to suspend trading, and issue an order approving or disapproving within ninety days. Footnote 302 of the June proposal records how often that has happened: since Regulation 40.11 was adopted in 2011, "the Commission has conducted three 90-day reviews under Sec. 40.11(c)". The body text of the same document calls them "resource-intensive".
Three in fifteen years, against 1,601 certifications in 2025. That ratio is not a criticism of the tool. It is a description of what the tool was built for, which is the hard interpretive case, not volume. Treating it as the thing that stands between a questionable contract and a trading screen was never realistic, and the Commission's own count says so.
The division that reads product filings asked Congress for nine more people
The supply side is public too. In the FY 2027 President's Budget, submitted by Chairman Michael Selig on 3 April 2026, the Commission requests $410.0 million and 650 full time equivalents. Reading the division table in that document matters more than the headline: the agency's FY 2025 actual was 659 FTE and the FY 2026 enacted level 636, so the FY 2027 request of 650 sits below what the agency actually had in 2025.
The Division of Market Oversight is the division that reviews products. Its line runs 98 FTE actual in FY 2025, 104 enacted in FY 2026, and 107 requested for FY 2027. Product review is one of five listed functions for those people, alongside registering exchanges and data repositories, examining compliance programmes, market analysis, and rulemaking. The budget describes the third function as "reviewing new and existing products listed by exchanges, and rules and rule amendments submitted by exchanges and SDRs".
That comparison is softer than it looks, and the document says so. Footnote 5 of the division table notes the FY 2025 actuals for Market Oversight "include the resources associated with the Office of the Chief Economist which was reorganized during FY 2025". A reader who wants to know how many people review event contract filings cannot get that number out of the budget. The best available reading is a division headcount moving by single digits while certifications moved by a factor in the hundreds.
The budget told Congress the workload could not be projected
The clearest sentence on capacity in any of these documents is in the budget's own appendix on actively traded contracts. The Commission reports that the number of actively traded futures and option contracts on United States exchanges "more than doubled from the previous year to 6,688 in FY 2025", and that the increase "was almost entirely driven by the growth of event contracts". It adds that the count understates reality, because contracts with similar events and features are shown as one line, so the figure is "an underestimate of the actual number of tickers being traded".
Then it stops forecasting. Citing historically high application numbers from venues planning to offer event contracts, the document states that "the CFTC is unable to project reliable estimates for FY 2026 and FY 2027, therefore, FY 2025 numbers have been used as placeholders", and that a large number of actively traded contracts increases workload because surveillance has to cover more products. The same appendix shows designated contract markets rising from 15 through FY 2020 to 23 in FY 2025. Footnote 298 of the June proposal puts the number of designated contract markets at 25, with 18 further exchange applications and 3 swap venue applications under review.
An agency placing last year's number in next year's forecast box, because the inflow has stopped being predictable, is a capacity statement written in budget language. It deserves to be read as one.
The Commission has written down that some contracts will trade before the answer arrives
None of this is an inference we are drawing on the agency's behalf. The June proposal addresses it directly. The Commission writes that clearer factors are expected to "reduce the frequency of submissions that raise potential public interest concerns, improving the efficiency of Commission and staff resources by reducing the need to conduct individualized event contract reviews", and footnote 158 explains the drafting choice by reference to "the high volume of event contract submissions and the wide potential scope of the public interest review".
The consequence is stated in the same section. Because the determination under the Special Rule at 7 U.S.C. 7a-2(c)(5)(C) follows submission, and because nothing obliges a venue to suspend trading during a review, the Commission acknowledges it is likely to find contracts contrary to the public interest "after trading of the event contracts has begun". It calls this "the inevitable result of the statutory structure" and accepts that "some event contracts that are contrary to the public interest may be traded during the period of time required for the Commission's review". Footnote 159 adds what happens to the people holding them: market participants who traded the contracts "would have their positions closed out", which the Commission preliminarily believes is the appropriate result.
Whatever one thinks of that conclusion, it tells an exchange exactly where the risk lands. A contract that should not have been listed gets taken off the board after money is in it, and the holder absorbs the unwind. Our note on what happens to open positions when a venue is blocked covers the same mechanism arriving from a different direction. As of 2 October 2026 the Federal Register carries only those two documents under RIN 3038-AF65 and no final rule, the comment period having closed on 27 July 2026, so the structure above is the one in force.
A filter the venue runs before filing is the only one that keeps pace
Read together, these documents describe a system that has quietly relocated its decisive step. The step that determines whether a questionable event contract reaches a screen is no longer a review; it is the judgement the exchange applies before it certifies. The Commission is explicitly counting on that, and is writing its factors so that venues can apply them to themselves.
We think this is the right place for the step to be, and we would say so even if the arithmetic were kinder. A standard the venue applies to its own pipeline scales with the pipeline. A review conducted by somebody else, once per filing, never will. That is the content of Directive 05, which commits signatories to setting standards "against the jurisdiction that regulates next, not only the one that has not yet". The jurisdiction that regulates next, in this reading, is the exchange's own listing committee.
The materials for doing this well are already public. The Division of Market Oversight published what a defensible event contract filing looks like in March 2026 and said in July that many venues were not following it, which we covered in our piece on those two staff letters. The proposed factor framework is on the record and can be used as a checklist before a filing rather than a defence after one. And the lesson of the compute derivatives request for comment, which we examined in a piece on questions arriving before products, is that the order in which a standard and a product appear is a choice somebody makes.
What we would want a venue to publish about its own listing gate
Four things, none of which require a rule to exist first. First, the written test the venue applies before certification, including which proposed public interest factors it scores and what disqualifies a contract outright. Second, how many proposed contracts that test rejected in the last quarter, because a gate with no refusals is not a gate. Third, who signs off, with the role named rather than the person, and whether anyone in that chain carries revenue targets for the product being reviewed. Fourth, what happens to open positions if a contract the venue certified is later found to be outside the line, stated before anyone needs it rather than during the unwind.
That last point is where Directive 01 bites, since it commits signatories to resolution rules that are "published before a market opens and are not revised while money is at risk". A venue that has already told its users how a wrongly listed contract will be unwound has done something no regulator timetable can do for it. Our earlier reading of the review process and the narrow window it leaves for changes explains why that work cannot start once a review is underway.
Nothing here asks a venue to list less. The number of certified event products is a sign the category found demand, and that is what we wanted. It does ask the venue to be the one that can describe, in public, why each of those products passed a test before it went out. If you are building toward that, the commitment is open.
Where these documents are
The advance notice is Federal Register document 2026-05105, published 16 March 2026 at 91 FR 12516, with footnote 9 carrying the five a year baseline and the 2021 and 2025 counts. The public interest proposal is document 2026-11854, published 12 June 2026, with footnote 298 on applications and daily listing volumes, footnote 302 on the three ninety day reviews, footnote 303 on the 2021 figure, and footnotes 158 and 159 on volume and on closed out positions. Both were read in full from the Government Publishing Office text. The product counts above come from the Commission's register of certified products in the Event category, read on 2 October 2026. The staffing and workload figures come from the FY 2027 President's Budget, dated April 2026, specifically the division summary table and the appendix on actively traded contracts. Regulation 40.2 and Regulation 40.11 were read as published rule text.