CFTC warns that contracts on what someone will say invite manipulation
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readThe CFTC's Division of Market Oversight issued an advisory on 22 September 2026 covering the listing and trading of mention market contracts — event contracts that settle on whether a named individual will say or "mention" certain words, attend or appear at an event, or otherwise interact with another person. The release number is 9302-26, and the related document is CFTC Staff Letter No. 26-27.
The reasoning is stated compactly. These contracts carry a heightened risk of manipulation because settlement turns on the discrete conduct of a person that may be neither independently generated nor externally verifiable.
The advisory sets out the limited circumstances in which such contracts may be listed consistently with the Commodity Exchange Act and Commission regulations, and gives non-exhaustive examples of factors designated contract markets should weigh when designing and submitting them under Regulations 40.2 or 40.3. It also reminds DCMs of their obligation under Core Principle 3 to list only contracts that are not readily susceptible to manipulation, and stresses the need for complete, contract-specific analysis when submitting these products under Part 40.
What it means
The phrase doing the work is "neither independently generated nor externally verifiable", and it is a better test than the category label. A contract on a scheduled economic release settles on a number produced by someone with no position and published on a fixed timetable. A contract on whether a person says a word settles on behaviour that a participant with enough money can arrange, and that often has no authoritative record at all — who decides whether it was said, in what context, and in which venue.
Note what the advisory is not. It is staff guidance, not a rule and not an enforcement action, and it does not prohibit the category. What it does is shift the burden at listing: a DCM submitting one of these under Part 40 now has explicit notice of the factors it is expected to have analysed, which makes a thin submission harder to defend later.
For anyone building or trading event contracts, the transferable question is the one the advisory implies: who produces the settlement fact, and could a person with a position influence them? That question does not only apply to mentions.