CME Group lists event contracts β short-dated instruments that settle on a yes/no question rather than on a price level. They passed 100 million contracts traded since their December launch, and moved to 24/7 availability at the end of May 2026.
CME’s event contract range spans financial indicators, cultural moments and sports. This page covers only the financial-indicator contracts β Fed decisions, inflation prints, and similar economic-data questions. Those sit naturally alongside our economic calendar. We do not cover the sports and cultural contracts.
How they are structured
A conventional futures contract has continuous payoff: if the price moves your way by X, you make X Γ the multiplier. An event contract does not. It poses a binary question β will the Fed’s target range be lower after the September meeting? β and pays a fixed amount if the answer is yes, nothing if no.
That changes the arithmetic completely:
| Futures | Event contract | |
|---|---|---|
| Payoff | Continuous, proportional to the move | Fixed, binary |
| Maximum loss | Not capped by the structure | The premium paid |
| What you are trading | Price level | Probability of an outcome |
| Duration | Weeks to years | Hours to weeks |
Because the payout is fixed, the price is the probability. A contract trading at $0.30 that pays $1.00 implies roughly a 30% chance the market assigns to that outcome β before costs. That is the genuinely useful part: the price is directly readable as a market-implied probability, which is much harder to extract from conventional futures.
Why they overlap with what we already publish
CME’s FedWatch tool, which is quoted constantly in financial journalism, derives implied probabilities of Fed rate moves from 30-Day Fed Funds futures (ZQ) pricing. Event contracts express similar questions directly, as a tradeable instrument rather than a derived statistic.
If you follow our economic calendar around FOMC meetings and CPI releases, these contracts are priced on exactly those events.
What to be careful about
Three things are worth stating plainly.
Binary payoff is not the same risk profile as futures. Capped loss sounds safer, and per contract it is. But a binary instrument can go to zero on an outcome that a conventional position would merely have lost some value on. “Right about the direction, wrong about the threshold” pays nothing.
Short duration compresses everything. A contract resolving in hours gives no time for a view to be wrong before it is right. Timing is not a secondary consideration; it is most of the trade.
They resemble betting products, and the resemblance is not accidental. Regulated event contracts sit in a genuinely contested regulatory space, and the fact that the same venue lists contracts on sports outcomes tells you something about the category. Treat the marketing framing of “expressing a view on the news” with appropriate scepticism β the structure is a fixed-odds proposition regardless of what it is written on.
Where to check the details
Contract terms, settlement sources and the current list of available events are on CME’s own event contracts pages. Because these are short-dated and the roster changes frequently, there is no useful static list to publish here β anything we printed would be stale within days.
This page describes a product structure and is not investment advice, and is not an encouragement to trade event contracts. Availability is restricted in some jurisdictions. Confirm terms with your broker or the exchange.