CME Group said on Thursday that it will launch financially settled Micro E-mini S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 options on June 29, pending regulatory review.
The new contracts will be one-tenth the size of their E-mini counterparts and will feature short-dated Monday through Friday expiries.
Financial settlement is a key design choice. Positions will settle in cash rather than triggering the operational process of delivering underlying futures at expiration. For brokers, FCMs and execution desks, that means cleaner expiry handling with no physical delivery risk.
“By combining a smaller contract size with the operational simplicity of financial settlement, we are providing traders with the capital-efficient and flexible toolset they need to manage benchmark U.S. equity index exposure with precision,” said Joe Hickey, Global Head of Equity Products at CME Group.
The products extend CME’s existing Micro E-mini Equity Index suite, which has surpassed 2.6 billion cumulative contracts traded since inception. That total includes more than 1 billion contracts each for S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 Micro E-mini products, CME said.
The new options will be listed on CME and traded via Globex.
