CBOE Cboe Global Markets, Inc. : Bullish and Bearish Analyst Opinions

"We are leveraging our enormous success in cash index option trading... We have strong interest from Schwab and others... They want their customers to have access to well-regulated markets." While unregulated offshore prediction markets get the media hype, traditional brokerages like Schwab need compliant, SEC/CFTC-regulated products to offer their massive retail client base. CBOE is building the exact infrastructure to capture this institutional and retail demand. LONG. CBOE is perfectly positioned to institutionalize and monetize the prediction market craze without the regulatory overhang faced by crypto-native platforms. Retail traders may prefer the user experience and broader, often unregulated, contract offerings of crypto-native platforms over traditional brokerage offerings.

"Our focus is really on event and prediction contracts, which I do think have utility based on financial instruments... What we're doing is... offering people the opportunity to trade a very simplified contract that gives them the ability to get a payoff for being mostly right, but not exactly right." The prediction market is booming, but largely dominated by unregulated or loosely regulated platforms focusing on pop culture and sports. By launching SEC-regulated, financially-focused prediction contracts with nuanced payout structures, Cboe is creating a differentiated derivatives product. This allows them to capture institutional and high-tier retail flow that requires strict regulatory compliance, expanding their Total Addressable Market (TAM) in a highly profitable niche. LONG CBOE. They are successfully leveraging their dominance in cash index options to capture a new, compliant segment of the rapidly growing prediction market ecosystem. By ignoring the sports betting segment (90% of current market volume), the actual demand for purely financial prediction contracts may be too niche to drive significant revenue growth.

The Fed put out a paper called Catching the Rise of Macro Markets... this is the most accurate gauge we have as the highest economic authority on the planet to what's going on... on GDP, unemployment, fed interest rates, inflation... we will always be committed to this and we'll be working with regulators for rulemaking. The Federal Reserve and CFTC are explicitly validating event contracts and macro prediction markets as legitimate, highly accurate financial instruments. As this asset class gains regulatory clarity and institutional acceptance, established regulated derivatives exchanges and brokers that offer event contracts will capture significant new trading volume and expand their Total Addressable Market. LONG. Regulatory validation of macro prediction markets creates a massive new revenue vertical for established derivatives exchanges and forward-thinking brokers. The CFTC could still impose strict position limits or ban certain high-volume event contracts (like political elections), severely capping the growth potential of the asset class.

"We really think that prediction markets will be bigger than the stock market. And I think the reason for that is that what prediction markets are is markets on anything that happens in the future... anyone in the world will have some opinion." Kalshi's landmark legal victory against the US government (CFTC) has officially de-risked and legalized event-based contracts as a financial asset class. While Kalshi is a private startup, this regulatory breakthrough creates a massive new Total Addressable Market (TAM) for public financial infrastructure companies. Forward-thinking brokerages (like Interactive Brokers, which recently launched its own prediction market, ForecastEx) and legacy derivative exchanges (CME, CBOE) are perfectly positioned to monetize this new retail and institutional demand by integrating event contracts into their existing platforms. LONG. The mainstreaming of prediction markets creates a net-new, high-margin revenue vertical for established public exchanges and brokerages that adapt to the event-trading boom. Private pure-play platforms (like Kalshi or crypto-native Polymarket) could monopolize the liquidity and volume, preventing legacy public exchanges from capturing meaningful market share. Additionally, future administrations could attempt to introduce new restrictive legislation against event betting.

I'll be live on @CNBC with Rick Santelli from the @Cboe floor today in 10 minutes, 2:20ET. A lot to talk about! 🥐

"The volatility is here... Have some exposure to the financial exchanges... CBOE is the name that I am looking at currently." Financial exchanges make money on volume and trading activity. When uncertainty and volatility spike, hedging and trading volumes increase, directly boosting revenue for exchange operators. Long Exchanges as a direct play on market volatility. A return to low-volatility, range-bound markets reducing trading volumes.