CME launched 77 single-stock futures on blue chips including Apple, Amazon and Nvidia. The contracts trade 23 hours a day on Globex with micro-sized options for retail traders.
CME Group launched single-stock futures on more than 50 of the largest U.S. companies, giving traders a leveraged way to bet on names like Apple, Amazon and Nvidia without owning the shares.
The launch covers 77 contracts in total – 55 standard-sized futures, each representing 100 shares of the underlying stock, and 22 micro-sized contracts covering 10 shares apiece. The lineup spans mega-cap technology names such as Alphabet, Meta and Tesla alongside the recently public SpaceX, plus household names including Micron, Pfizer and Walmart, according to CME's announcement.
All contracts are cash-settled against the underlying stock's closing price and follow a quarterly expiration structure similar to CME's existing equity index futures. Tim McCourt, CME's global head of equities, FX and alternative products, said the launch is a response to trader demand.
"Clients want to manage equity price risk with more precision and with the capital efficiencies of a centralized marketplace," McCourt said.
He told reporters the contracts have "the ability to bring in a lot of new traders to our ecosystem." CME said it is working with more than 35 retail intermediary firms to distribute access alongside its usual institutional desks.
The single-stock futures trade for roughly 23 hours a day, five days a week on CME's Globex platform, far longer than the 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern window that governs regular US stock trading. That structure lets traders react to earnings reports, macro data or geopolitical headlines the moment they break rather than waiting for the opening bell.
Mat Cashman, principal for investor education at the Options Clearing Corp, cautioned that liquidity can thin out overnight. Trading outside of normal hours, "including during the volatile minutes after companies report earnings, can be choppy," Cashman said – a warning that echoes concerns about thin order books in CME's round-the-clock crypto markets.
Unlike commission-free equity and options apps that rely on payment for order flow, futures traders typically pay a commission on every single-stock contract they trade.
Single-stock futures are not new to the US, but they have a rocky history. OneChicago, an exchange jointly owned by CME Group, Cboe Global Markets and Interactive Brokers, traded security futures for nearly two decades before it shut down in September 2020, citing thin demand.
The new contracts exclude any crypto tokens or digital assets, but they run on infrastructure CME has refined through its crypto business – cash-settled, margin-based products that let traders take leveraged, custody-free exposure to a fast-moving asset. CME launched bitcoin futures in 2017 and has since built the largest regulated derivatives market for digital assets in the country.
That crypto franchise kept expanding in 2026 with CME rolling out 24/7 trading for its bitcoin and ether futures and options on May 29, clearing roughly $50 million across more than 7,200 contracts in the debut weekend. Since then, the firm has added crypto index futures tracking bitcoin, solana and XRP, and had slated a bitcoin volatility futures rollout.
CME's bitcoin derivatives book has cooled from its highs. Open interest in CME bitcoin futures fell to $8.41 billion on April 11, a 14-month low, as annualized basis-trade returns compressed from the 15%-20% range down to about 5% and daily volume slipped below $3 billion.
CME's single-stock futures face a different competitive dynamic. Retail brokerages offering zero-commission equity trading have made single-stock bets cheap and accessible. The futures will need to attract traders who value the extended trading hours, margin efficiency, or the ability to short stocks without locating shares to borrow.
The 55 standard contracts and 22 micro contracts give CME something OneChicago never had: a retail-friendly micro contract at one-tenth the notional size. Whether that is enough to sustain volume where a previous attempt failed will depend on how many of those 35 retail intermediaries actually push the product to their clients.
McCourt said the launch is designed to widen CME's user base beyond its traditional institutional clientele. The 23-hour trading window and the micro contract structure are the two features aimed squarely at that goal.
CME's stock page carries an Alpha Score of 59 out of 100, a moderate label reflecting the firm's dominant position in listed derivatives balanced against the competitive pressure from zero-commission brokers and the mixed history of single-stock futures in the US.
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