Why CME wants phone traders slinging leveraged Nvidia contracts at 3 AM after earnings drop

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.

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