Cboe Global Markets and the retail brokerage Robinhood said on September 30, 2026 that they plan to launch a new class of yes/no "KPI contracts," tied to the key performance numbers companies report in their earnings, starting with 23 U.S.-listed firms. The product is pending regulatory approval and is expected to arrive in October 2026, with Robinhood set to be the first retail broker to offer it to clients.
What makes the announcement more than a product reveal is the route it takes. Cboe, the Chicago exchange operator, plans to list the contracts on its SEC-registered U.S. securities exchange, a different regulatory track from the CFTC-overseen venues that Kalshi and Polymarket use. It lands the same week the CFTC moved to pull event contracts under its own authority, putting two federal regulators on a path to decide who oversees the fast-growing market for trading on real-world outcomes.
The companies made the announcement at Robinhood's third annual HOOD Summit. Cboe said it plans to list the first contracts on 23 U.S.-listed companies, and that both firms will waive fees on the product through the end of 2026.
What a KPI contract actually is
A KPI contract is a binary, yes/no instrument that resolves on a company-specific key performance indicator: the kind of operational number a company discloses in its quarterly earnings, such as revenue, subscriber additions or units delivered, rather than on the share price itself. A trader takes a position on whether a named metric lands above or below a set threshold when the company reports, and the contract resolves to a fixed value once the figure is public.
That is a narrower instrument than a share trade. Buying the shares expresses a view on the whole company; a KPI contract isolates one disclosed number. JJ Kinahan, who leads retail expansion and alternative investment products at Cboe, framed the contracts as a way to give investors granular exposure to the individual components that move a company, letting them trade a single metric rather than the share as a whole.
Steve Quirk, Robinhood's chief brokerage officer, cast the earnings contracts as another tool for retail investors to act on an expected result, a more precise way to position around an anticipated company KPI. Cboe has not yet published the list of 23 tickers or the exact metric that will resolve each contract; those details are expected in the contract specifications filed with regulators.
Why the SEC route is the real story
Prediction and event contracts have, until now, reached U.S. retail almost entirely through one door. Venues like Kalshi, and Polymarket as it works toward U.S. re-entry, operate as CFTC-regulated designated contract markets (DCMs), a derivatives framework overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Cboe is proposing a second door: listing its KPI contracts as SEC-regulated products on a registered U.S. securities exchange, overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Polymarket, the prediction-market exchange where traders buy and sell contracts on real-world events, and its CFTC-regulated peers built the current retail market on the derivatives side of the house. A securities-exchange pathway treats the same economic idea, a contract that pays out based on an outcome, as a security instead. For traders, the regulator is not a technicality: it sets the disclosure, clearing and investor-protection rules that govern the product, and determines which brokers can offer it.
No fees through the end of 2026
Cboe said it will not charge fees on the KPI binary options through the end of 2026, subject to regulatory review, and Robinhood said it will likewise offer them with no fees through year-end. A fee waiver at launch is a familiar way to seed activity in a new product: it lowers the cost of taking a position while the market builds the liquidity that makes pricing reliable, and it puts competitive pressure on venues that charge for similar event contracts elsewhere.
The clearing piece
Alongside the listing, Cboe filed for temporary registration of Cboe Clear U.S., LLC (CCUS), its U.S. clearing arm, as a Covered Clearing Agency to clear the KPI contracts. Clearing is the plumbing that stands between buyer and seller, guaranteeing that a resolved contract actually pays out, and a Covered Clearing Agency is the regulated entity that performs that role. Routing the contracts through its own clearing house lets Cboe control the full chain.
Rob Hocking, Cboe's global head of derivatives, described the launch as less about a single product than about Cboe using its combined strengths across listing, trading and clearing, a vertical setup that few competitors can match in one house.
A fight over who writes the rules
The timing is pointed. Two days before the announcement, on September 28, 2026, the CFTC sent two rules to the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the office that reviews federal regulations before they take effect. One, a proposed rule (RIN 3038-AF82), would redraw the legal definition of a "swap" to pull event contracts squarely under CFTC authority; the other, an interim final rule (RIN 3038-AF81), would carve out casino-style gaming products from that definition.
Read together, the CFTC's rules are an effort to cement its grip on event contracts just as Cboe proposes to route an entire category of them through the SEC instead. The two agencies are not formally fighting over this specific launch, but they are advancing competing answers to the same question: when a contract pays out on a real-world outcome, is it a derivative the CFTC governs or a security the SEC governs? The answer shapes every venue in the space.
Robinhood's widening menu
For Robinhood, KPI contracts extend a steady push beyond plain share trading into a broader menu of tradable products, from options to crypto to event contracts. Being first to carry a new SEC-regulated class of contracts fits that strategy and gives it a product its rivals will not have at launch.
Coinbase29%DaNuWhat traders still do not know
Several specifics are not yet public. Cboe's release did not state a payout figure per contract, and the identities of the 23 companies, along with the exact KPI that resolves each contract, await the contract specifications. The product is not live: it is pending regulatory approval and expected in October 2026, so no trading has begun. SEC action on Cboe's rule filing and on the Cboe Clear U.S. registration will determine whether that timeline holds.
The contest that matters here is not Cboe against Polymarket over who lists the better contract. It is the SEC against the CFTC over who writes the rulebook, and this launch forces the question into the open: the same contract tied to a company's quarterly number is a security on Cboe's exchange and a swap under the CFTC's proposed definition, and only one of those classifications can hold. The fee waiver and the 23 tickers are the headline; which regulator's definition survives is what decides whether this market has one front door or two.
