Open Access#12001
New Legislation Permitting Stock Futures: The Long and Winding Road
This article will explain how the stock futures issue arose, how Congress handled it last year, and the application of the legislation to this new product. While I believe that the approach taken in the CFMA will allow stock futures to trade on a level regulatory playing field in many areas with stock options, which are regulated solely as securities, it will not remove all the disparities between these two competing products. That will only occur when Congress acquires the political will to merge the SEC and the CFTC to create a modem regulatory system for the U.S. equity markets.
