A futures broker that wants to publish a video saying how much a customer made cannot simply publish it. Two people have to approve it first, and one of them does not work there. That second approval belongs to the National Futures Association, whose Compliance Rule 2-29 gives it a ten day head start. The rulebook page dates the rule to 19 November 1985 and lists eleven amendments since, the most recent effective 21 July 2025.
None of it reaches a prediction market. That much is unsurprising, because Rule 2-29 binds futures commission merchants, introducing brokers, commodity pool operators and commodity trading advisors, and an exchange is none of those. The part worth sitting with is that the process on the far side of the gap is not a concept. It is a written procedure with a trigger, a clock, a named reviewer, a filing checklist and a retention period, and as of 25 October 2026 a venue could copy the whole thing over its own promotional partners without waiting for a rule.
Two approvals stand between a profit claim and an audience
The futures regime splits the job in half. The inside half is Rule 2-29(e), which requires written supervisory procedures and says that before first use, all promotional material must be reviewed and approved in writing by a supervisor "other than the individual who prepared such material". The exception is narrow and tells you what the rule is for: the preparer may approve their own work only where nobody else is qualified to. One person does not get to be both the author and the check.
The outside half is Rule 2-29(h), which sends material to somebody who is not an employee. It applies where promotional material uses audio or video content either to make a specific trading recommendation or to "refer to or describe the extent of any profit" obtained in the past or achievable in the future. Where it applies, the member may not "use or directly benefit from" the material unless it has been submitted to NFA's Promotional Material Review Team "for its review and approval at least 10 days prior to first use". It is not the only route outward: Rule 2-29(j)(13) imposes the same ten day submission on security futures material designed to reach a public audience through mass media. The two triggers differ, and the difference matters below.
Two pieces of that sentence do more work than they look like. The trigger is content, not format and not firm size: a glossy brand film with no numbers does not cross the line, a phone recording of a screen with a gain on it does. And the phrase "use or directly benefit from" keeps a member inside the rule even where it never touched the camera, wrote the script or uploaded the file, so long as the video was made to bring it business. That is the clause that reaches a paid outsider.
Ten days is the mandatory clock and fourteen is the optional one
NFA runs two channels and they are easy to confuse. The mandatory one is the subsection above. On its page of regulatory obligations for trading advisors, NFA states that covered material must go in ten days before first use and that it will review such submissions within ten days of receipt.
The optional channel is older and wider. Interpretive Notice 9009, issued by NFA staff on 1 May 1989 and revised most lately on 18 March 2026, describes a programme to review promotional material before first use that is explicitly "voluntary", and asks for a longer runway: material goes to the Member Oversight Department through NFA's electronic Promotional Material Filing System "at least 14 calendar days prior to its first intended use". The same NFA page says the programme is free and that review happens within fourteen days of receipt.
So the compulsory route is the quicker one, which is the opposite of what anybody designing this from scratch would guess. It is also looser in a detail that matters to anyone copying it: Rule 2-29(h) says ten days without saying whether they are calendar or business days, while Notice 9009 says calendar for the voluntary route. The subsection then adds "or such shorter period as NFA may allow in particular circumstances", which is how a deadline avoids becoming a gag on anything time sensitive.
Notice 9009 is also where the submission stops being a file and becomes a record. A filing has to come from a firm representative designated by the member's security manager, and it has to carry four facts: the name of the supervisor or supervisors who reviewed and approved the material, how it will be used and disseminated to prospective clients, the types of investment product being offered, and the date the member intends to begin using it. Every one is a question a venue could ask a promotional partner, and none needs a regulator to be the one asking.
YouTube sits in the record as the reason the rule moved online
The subsection did not start out covering the internet. The expansion is documented in a notice of filing published in the Federal Register on 11 January 2010, in which the Securities and Exchange Commission set out NFA's own account of why it was amending the rule. In December 2008, the filing records, NFA's advisory committees had taken up the growing use of blogs, chat rooms and forums to solicit customers, and NFA staff had read what the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority was telling its own members about the same problem.
Then comes the sentence that dates the whole category of problem. NFA, the filing says, had "noticed that profit claims that used to appear on radio and television are moving to the Internet and showing up on sites such as YouTube", and therefore proposed that these videos, like similar radio and television advertisements, be submitted to NFA in advance for review and approval. The accompanying statement on competition is just as plain: there might be "some burden on members who have avoided this requirement by only using the Internet to distribute such advertisements". The gap was closed because people had found it and walked through it. The same notice records that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission told NFA on 24 December 2009 that it had determined not to review the change, which let it take effect. That is also the answer to the first objection a venue will hear, that short form video is too fast to pre clear: the regime met that argument by letting the deadline shorten, not by dropping it.
Approval from outside does not move the responsibility inward
The most useful sentence in the scheme limits what the review is worth. Notice 9009 says using the programme "in no way lessens" the member's obligation to review, approve and supervise all of its promotional material, then goes further: a member "may not rely on or attempt to use NFA staff's review to meet its promotional material supervisory obligations" under Rule 2-29.
The notice is equally frank about the limits of the review itself. NFA staff, it says, will not be able to independently verify the accuracy of every statement or numerical claim within the review window, and submitting material does not stop NFA from raising compliance issues or acting on misstatements found later. What the review is designed to do is stated outright and is narrower: guidance on whether the material strikes the appropriate balance between the possibility of profit and the risk of loss, and on the proper use of disclaimers.
Anyone adopting this voluntarily has to adopt that limit with it. A venue that reviewed a partner's video and then treated its own sign off as the answer to a later complaint would have built the one version of this process that is worse than none, because it would have manufactured a document saying the claim was checked. Interpretive Notice 9003 makes the same point about the rule as a whole: literal compliance with Rule 2-29 will not stop NFA raising issues with the content.
The guidance runs out one letter short of the audio and video rule
There is a hole in this, and it is not where you would expect. Notice 9003 is the long interpretive companion to Rule 2-29. It grounds the rule in section 17(p)(3) of the Commodity Exchange Act, codified at 7 U.S.C. section 21(p)(3), then runs a section by section analysis covering (a) the general prohibition, (b) content, (c) hypothetical results, (d) statements of opinion, (e) written supervisory procedures, (f) recordkeeping and (g) filing with NFA.
It stops there. As of 25 October 2026 there is no paragraph on section (h), even though Notice 9003 was itself revised on 18 March 2026 and is therefore not a stale document that nobody has opened in a decade. The provisions that get detailed treatment are the ones a firm administers internally. The one that requires an outsider to look at the material before the public does has no interpretive gloss at all, while hypothetical performance results have an entire notice of their own in Notice 9025, made binding by Rule 2-29(c)(5).
That absence is practical. The questions a new adopter hits first, such as whether a livestream counts as audio or video content and when a re edit becomes a first use, have no published answers to copy.
FINRA attaches a person's name and a number to the filing
The futures rule is not the only worked example. FINRA Rule 2210 governs the same problem in securities and solves it differently. Its internal step resembles the futures one. Rule 2210(b)(1)(A) requires an appropriately qualified registered principal to approve each retail communication "before the earlier of its use or filing" with FINRA's Advertising Regulation Department. The pre use filing step is keyed to something else entirely. Under Rule 2210(c)(1)(A) a new member firm has to file retail communications used in public media at least ten business days before first use for one year after its membership becomes effective, and under (c)(1)(B) the Department can impose the same obligation on any firm it finds has departed from the rule's standards.
So FINRA triggers advance review on who the firm is and what it is selling, which is the same logic as Rule 2-29(j)(13), while Rule 2-29(h) triggers it on what the material says. Neither is obviously right. What both regimes refuse to leave vague is who is answerable. Rule 2210(c)(5) requires each filing to carry the name, title and Central Registration Depository number of the principal who approved the communication, with the approval date, and Rule 2210(c)(4) closes the obvious video loophole: where a draft or storyboard was filed, the final filmed version is filed too. A process that cannot name whoever approved a video is not this process.
No exchange rulebook reaches the video a partner posts
None of this binds a prediction market exchange, and the disclosure obligations that do bind one point elsewhere. Commission Regulation 38.401 requires a designated contract market to have procedures, resources and arrangements for providing accurate information to the Commission, market participants and the public, and lists what that covers: contract terms, the rules governing the trading mechanism, public notice of new listings and rule changes, and a rulebook that is accurate, complete, current and readily accessible. It says nothing about advertising, because it governs what the exchange publishes about itself. What a paid outsider publishes about the exchange falls outside it.
This site has walked the two halves of that gap from the other direction already. What a venue should require of the promotional content itself was the subject of The First Screen a Trader Sees Belongs to Someone Else, and which government rule reaches a paid creator's post was the subject of A Rule Covers the Staged Trade but Not the Undisclosed Payment. This is the third piece and the dullest, which is probably why it is still missing: not a standard for what the video may say, and not a theory about who can be fined, but a procedure for somebody looking at the video before it goes out.
The directive it answers to is the fourth. Our manifest commits a signatory to Education Before Frictionless Growth, meaning that a first time user learns what a price means and how their market resolves before they learn how to deposit faster. A recruitment video built around a number somebody won teaches the opposite lesson, before the account exists, on a surface the venue does not own.
What a venue would have to decide before borrowing the clock
Taking the procedure across is not a drafting exercise, because four of its parts have no default answer once the regulator is out of the middle.
- What trips the review. NFA chose content: a specific trading recommendation, or a reference to the extent of profit past or future. A venue could copy that line or draw its own, but it has to be one a partner can apply without counsel.
- Who the reviewer is. The futures model works because NFA is neither the firm nor the customer. A venue reviewing material that promotes the venue is not in that position and should say so, rather than borrow the word approval and the credibility that comes with it.
- How much lead time. Ten days was set for radio buys and survived the move to internet video only because Rule 2-29(h) lets NFA shorten it case by case. A venue copying the number has to copy that release valve too, or the rule gets broken within a month and then ignored.
- How long the record lives. Rule 2-29(f) requires copies of the material, the record of the review and approval, and the supporting material behind any performance or testimonial claim, kept for the periods in Commission Regulation 1.31 and measured "from the date of the last use". On its promotional material FAQ page NFA puts that at five years, the first two readily accessible. Measuring from last use rather than first is what makes the clock work on a video that stays online for years.
A venue that worked through those four would end up with something it could point at: a trigger, a named reviewer, a lead time with an exception, a filing recording who approved what and when, and a retention period that outlives the campaign. That is a smaller thing than a code of conduct and a more checkable one, which is the trade this initiative keeps arguing for. The futures industry decided in 1985 that a profit claim should not reach the public on one firm's word alone, and in 2009 that moving it to YouTube changed nothing. A category being asked, as of 25 October 2026, to account for how its growth happened could do worse than show the paperwork for the videos.